Works
A body of work, built in series.
The work of Jens Hartmann develops in series — each one a sustained record of a single terrain. The first is Iceland. Further series are in progress, and will be added as they hold.
Series — Iceland
Iceland's interior is young ground. Rhyolite mountains carry the colour of the magma they cooled from; glacier ice holds ash and meltwater pressed into layers. Both are records — of heat, of pressure, of slow loss. What looks ancient is recent, and still moving.
This series was made over three months in 2022, across the interior — the outwash plains, the highland routes away from the marked roads. It does not photograph Iceland as a destination. It records the ground as a condition: surface, weather, pressure, the cooled residue of force.
Landscape photography was built to deliver the sublime — the overwhelming view, the proof of an untouched world. That view is no longer honest. These photographs are made after it: not the spectacle of nature, but a plain finding about what the ground is.
