Dutch Landscapes

Mishka Henner built Dutch Landscapes from a quirk of Google Earth's satellite coverage: the Dutch government, unlike most, chose not to blur or pixelate sensitive sites but to cover them with bold, brightly colored polygons, an intervention meant to obscure that instead reads as a deliberate visual mark. Henner gathered these polygon-covered views of military bases, ammunition depots, NATO storage annexes, and royal palaces and presented them as found landscape images, framing state censorship as an unlikely continuation of Dutch landscape painting.

The book is a softcover, print-on-demand edition, 25 x 20 cm, 106 pages, self-published by Henner in Manchester; some archives list a 2013 printing of the same open edition. The related images were also produced as a series of twelve archival pigment prints and shown in group exhibitions including "From Here On" at Les Rencontres d'Arles (2011), Centre Pompidou-Metz (2013), and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2014).

Dutch Landscapes helped establish Henner's reputation for work built from appropriated satellite and aerial imagery. He went on to win the Kleine Hans Award in 2011, was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2013, and received the ICP Infinity Award for Art the same year.