Identity and Climate Change in Contemporary Photography

Through an interdisciplinary lens, this book examines how contemporary photography captures shifting attitudes towards Dutch land, water, history, and identity, in the context of the Netherlands being at the crossroads of industrial globalisation and climate vulnerability. The study presents the Dutch landscape as a case study, exploring the ways in which contemporary projects of landscape photography reflect changing attitudes towards land and nature, in the context of global climate and social change. The author takes the approach from both an art historical angle, against the background of the famous history of Dutch landscape painting, and a cultural geographic dimension, specifically how climate change is altering the understanding of the physical Dutch landscape. Each of the photographic projects in this book, by key contemporary Dutch artists, addresses aspects of these issues in their own way while engaging with both climate change and seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting. Artists featured include Kim Boske, Marie-José Jongerius, Ellen Kooi, Awoiska van der Molen and Edwin Zwakman. This book is ideal for scholars and practitioners in photography, art history, cultural geography, environmental humanities, landscape architecture and Dutch studies.

Maartje van den Heuvel is curator of photography at the Special Collections of Leiden University Libraries, the Netherlands. She was awarded her PhD by Leiden University in 2018 for her dissertation Picturing Landscape. As a guest curator, she organises photography and art exhibitions accompanied by scholarly publications, collaborating with institutions including the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo; Aperture Gallery, New York; the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; the Fotomuseum Den Haag and Hilversum; and the Kunsthal, Rotterdam.

Introduction 1. Land, Place, Identity: Netherlandish Landscapes as Visual Expressions of Dutch Culture 2. Dutch Landscape: The Concept 3. Coast: From International Trading to Endangered Marine life 4. River: Pictorial River Landscapes to Mechanised Hydraulic infrastructure - and back 5. Polder: From Man-Made Waterscapes to Industrial Infrastructure 6. Higher Sands: From Romanticized Pastoral Poverty to intensive cattle farming and back to Enchanting Heathland Walks Epilogue