Wout Berger: Harvest, 2007

Harvest, 2007, by Dutch photographer Wout Berger, was published in the artist’s monograph Like Birds. He is interested in contaminated sites that he often photographs as idyllic landscapes. He says of his work, “the European landscape becomes more and more a nature-culture landscape where nature intervenes with human action. In my photography, I pronounce no value judgment; I experience culture as a niche within nature. Correctly the passage between culture and nature is interesting, especially those spots where nature reconquers areas on the cultural landscape. This, I observe at a small scale. Thus bits of nature can arise where cultivated landscape lies fallow awaiting a construction project.”

Berger’s images capture a keen interest in the details of such landscapes. Yet, by omitting references to scale and landmarks such as the horizon, houses, people, or cars, his work verges on abstraction. This print was produced in conjunction with Aperture’s exhibition Nature as Artifice: New Dutch Landscape in Photography and Video Art, coinciding with the four-hundredth anniversary of the arrival of Henry Hudson to New York Harbor aboard the Dutch vessel Halve Maen.

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