A journey is the conquest of time and space — a discovery and a photographic experiment at once.
Over the past twenty years, I have crossed the European continent from Tromsø to Bordeaux and from Cardiff to Katowice. I photographed landscapes whose very existence depends on human intervention. All are shaped by the human hand and therefore ambiguous in origin.

The first landscape I remember is the heathland north of Hilversum in the Netherlands. I saw it from the third-floor window of the apartment where I grew up. In the distance stood the water towers of Laren and Bussum. It became my own landscape. I learned the hidden paths, the trees I could climb, and how to disappear from my parents’ view. Later, I crossed the same heathland by bicycle on my way to school, first in daylight, then also at night. In the moonlight, I rode the narrow sandy paths and knew every bump by heart.

Between 1995 and 2012, I lived in Flevoland, land reclaimed from the former Zuiderzee. I was raising two young children. I already knew the openness of the polder from my early years in Hilversum, but here the scale intensified. In this flat expanse there was little to discover except the vast fields. What interested me was not the natural world but the ideas behind its construction. Field sizes were determined by economic logic. Forests were planted with a predetermined vision of “future nature”. The largest nature reserve arose from an unused industrial zone. Flevoland is a landscape conceived as an experiment, with humanity as its designer.

My interest lies in the entanglement of culture and nature, a question rooted in my study of Cultural Anthropology. Is reality internal or external? Is the divide between nature and culture even real? Our concepts shape our environment, and our environment shapes us. Can a landscape be understood as “nature with meaning”? And how is that meaning affected by the medium with which we describe or represent it? The observer influences what is seen. This makes it necessary to objectify the tools of observation if we want to speak truthfully — materially and conceptually. These questions guide my work and drive the long technical experiments in my printing practice.

The landscape is the arena where this interaction becomes visible. Years ago, I had a camera built for me, the size and shape of a small telescope. It gives me stability in a world of constant motion. It produces negatives with enormous amounts of information — more than the eye can perceive in the moment. My prints are the result of analysing that captured data. Through manual printing processes, I stretch the limits of representation until I discover something I had not seen before.

I am a landscape myself. I cannot detach the photographer from the child on the Hilversum heath. The empty polders, the coal mountains, the forests of Scandinavia, the Norwegian fjells — each carries a history of human intention, material extraction, or idealisation. The Netherlands sinks below sea level because of its own exploitation. Coal mountains can be turned into parks. Forestry in Sweden and Finland is managed for sustainability. The Norwegian wilderness is, in part, an image. What do I actually see?

We must navigate between exploitation and preservation. Sweden and Finland apply this insight in their forests. The Netherlands has learned that centuries of poldering lead to a struggle rather than a balance with the sea. Yet landscapes shaped by use — polders, spoil heaps, production forests — have enough intelligence and regenerative capacity to become vital again.

Photography was once called “the pencil of nature”, an objective recorder of reality. Today it is also the main tool for falsifying it. Photography can obscure as much as it can reveal. I search for truth fully aware that this truth is one I construct. That realisation drives my work forward and leads me to my next destination.

Witho Worms