Horizonte is part of my engagement with ideas of nature and archetypes of the natural as products of economic and ideological interests.

The book Walfänger, released in 1938, presented a heroic account of the labor and adventures on board the Jan Wellem, the first German factory whaling ship to be launched in the twentieth century. Its author, Wolfgang Frank, started his career as a writer under the Nazis. During the war, he produced bestsellers about life in the Navy; after 1945, he turned to a nature romanticism that proved immensely popular with readers. The book is illustrated with ninety photographs taken by the author himself that show hunting motifs and life on board as well as the ocean as such—as a metaphor, subject in its own right, and screen onto which fantasies of domination can be projected.

Horizonte is a restored selection of twentysix clichés from the associated set of photographic printing clichés, which had suffered severe damage from corrosion during decades in storage. The pictures had turned into pictorial fragments. The losses prompted questions: Can the ideologies that inscribe themselves on the surfaces of pictures be washed off? Can fragmentary depictions of the subjugation of nature become expressions of a pictorial resistance?

The plates, after all, had become something else in the process of corrosion, and so also illustrated how representations of the imaginary come into being and vanish again. Carved into the red etching ground, their motifs had begun to emancipate themselves from their somber historical origin, yielding new forms that opened them up toward the horizon of the present. That horizon’s compass is in the eye of the beholder, making contemplation of the images an ever-shifting open-ended process. The very instability with which time has infused them reveals glimpses of a profoundly fraught relationship between nature and humankind in the past and present.

The photographic printing plates for the book that inspired Horizonte are also the point of departure for an extended photographic series: Spuren probes questions of heritage, value, and nature as a witness to its time.