For Aindreas Scholz, there is a contradiction at the heart of environmental photography. Photos of landscapes 鈥渃an sometimes aestheticise environmental damage while remaining materially distant and separate from it鈥�, he says, while photography itself consumes water and produces waste.
鈥淚 do not want to make work about ecological responsibility while pretending that the photographic printing process is somehow outside that problem,鈥� says Scholz.
His latest project tackles this contradiction head on through the medium of cameraless photography. The image above, The Most Beautiful Anthropocene #53, was made while Scholz was at an artist residency in France. Using 19th-century lumen and cyanotype printing techniques, he took already-exposed photographic dark-room paper, water from a nearby pond and plants from a local flower meadow to create the work.
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鈥淲hat you are looking at is the physical trace of plants and environmental conditions acting directly on a photographic material,鈥� says Scholz.
The image is part of an bringing together two of his bodies of work, And So I Watch You From Afar and The Most Beautiful Anthropocene, at the Brighton Museum & Art Gallery, UK, until 18 January 2027. Part of this year鈥檚 , the installation sees Scholz explore how ecologically sustainable cameraless photography can provide a record of environmental change, from plant life to coastal edges, focusing on environments affected by humans.
鈥淩ather than photographing a landscape from a distance, I bring the photographic surface into direct contact with environmental conditions and materials, sunlight, water, seawater, rainwater, plants, salt, soil, residues and atmosphere,鈥� says Scholz.
鈥淭hat distinction is important to me,鈥� he says. 鈥淚 am less interested in making a photograph of climate change than in asking whether a photographic printing process can itself be materially affected by the same environmental conditions that the work is trying to address.鈥�
