Hier

Hier ("here") gathers Jitka Hanzlová's long look at the Ruhr, a landscape built and rebuilt for industry until nature is reduced to whatever gaps are left over.

The book pairs 47 color plates of people and places across 96 pages, moving between tender, direct portraits and views of trees, verges, and scrubland that seem to insist on their own presence inside a heavily managed environment. Hanzlová began the project after settling near Essen and returned to it over more than a decade, from 1998 through 2010. Walther König published this hardcover edition in 2014, with an introduction by the novelist Terézia Mora.

Hanzlová, born in 1958 in Czechoslovakia, fled to Germany in 1982 and studied photography at Essen from 1987 to 1994; her work returns to the relationship between landscape, civilization, and the places that shape identity, from her early series on her home village of Rokytník to Hier's study of her adopted region. She has had solo exhibitions at the Museum Folkwang, Fotomuseum Winterthur, and Fundación MAPFRE, and won the BMW-Paris Photo Prize in 2007.