NATUR

NATUR is a book of Michael Schmidt's black-and-white photographs of the German landscape, taken between 1987 and 1997 and edited into one sequence.

MACK published it in 2014 as a 104-page book in embossed cloth, with 63 black-and-white plates. The MACK text describes a range of greys that shift gradually from light to dark, and says the black-and-white filter lets Schmidt keep the world at a distance and limits the viewer's subjective reading. The order of the plates was built by montage, so the sequence carries as much of the work as any single picture. Schmidt died in Berlin on 24 May 2014, a few days after NATUR was printed.

Schmidt was born in Berlin in 1945. MACK names Waffenruhe (1987), U-NI-TY (1996), Berlin nach 45 (2005) and Lebensmittel (2012) as his best-known books. His solo exhibitions include U-NI-TY at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Sprengel Museum, Hannover (1996), Grey as Colour. Photographs until 2009 at Haus der Kunst, Munich (2010), and Lebensmittel at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin (2013).