For Aindreas Scholz, there is a contradiction at the heart of environmental photography. Photos of landscapes “can sometimes aestheticise environmental damage while remaining materially distant and separate from it”, he says, while photography itself consumes water and produces waste.
“I do not want to make work about ecological responsibility while pretending that the photographic printing process is somehow outside that problem,” 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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“What you are looking at is the physical trace of plants and environmental conditions acting directly on a photographic material,” 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’s , 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.
“Rather 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,” says Scholz.
“That distinction is important to me,” he says. “I 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.”
