To pick up a stone

Stones. Why do we have the tendency to them pick up from the ground? Why do we like to throw them in water? And why do many people take them home as souvenirs? We seem to want to connect to earth this way, or perhaps even to eternity. It is precisely this connection that Claudia den Boer (NL) was looking for when she picked up stones in the Moroccan Sahara, the Tibetan highlands, around the mysterious Montserrat in Catalonia, and the mighty Georgian Caucasus. In these places, the stone and the mountain became one for her.

Once home, she went on a second journey, but this time within the landscapes of her analog negatives. By zooming in on the images she had previously made, she looked again at what she had already seen, discovering new landscapes.

In photographic studies, Den Boer examines the experience of scale, perspective and spatiality through an eclectic variety of images of mountains, rocks and stones. Time, light and distance determine the experience of something as massive as a mountain, but can the expression of a mountain also be discovered in a close-up, or even in a single stone? The diversity of her images show how changeable our view of a seemingly static object can be.

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"The lifting of sheets, peeking what is behind them, and around them, causes a participatory stance to evolve: there are no essays in this book, only stones, rocks, and mountains for your visual and tactile journey. The absence of essays and other texts causes the viewer to confront and sort out the visuals on his or her own, without explanations or analyses by others. Makes you rethink your relationship to the earth a bit… a highly recommended assignment."
—Gerhard Clausing (Photobook Journal)