Lukas Felzmann: Across Ground

Working from a conceptual atlas, Felzmann's photographs of California counties combine the natural with the cultural.

Swiss photographer and Stanford University professor Lukas Felzmann (born 1959) takes a two-part approach to California's geography in a poetic journey along the crossroads of culture and nature. The first volume contained within the slipcase, Ground, is a carefully sequenced photobook containing one image for each of the state's 58 counties, with no human presence but, as poet Forrest Gander writes, "marked everywhere by our signs." The second book, Across, abandons this invisible grid to freely roam across the land, encompassing all the natural and man-made features that make California unique. A space of moving, belonging and contemplation is navigated through colors, grayscale and corridors of focus. The result is not only a journey across land but also across time and the process of photography itself.