To pick up a stone

Stones. Why do we have the tendency to them pick up from the ground? Why do we like to throw them in water? And why do so many people take them home as souvenirs? We seem to want to connect to earth this way, or perhaps even to eternity. It is precisely this connection that Claudia den Boer (NL) was looking for when she picked up stones in the Moroccan Sahara, the Tibetan highlands, around the mysterious Montserrat in Catalonia, and the mighty Georgian Caucasus. In these places, the stone and the mountain became one for her.

Once home, she went on a second journey, but this time within the landscapes of her analog negatives. By zooming in on the images she had previously made, she looked again at what she had already seen, discovering new landscapes.

In photographic studies, Den Boer examines the experience of scale, perspective and spatiality through an eclectic variety of images of mountains, rocks and stones. Time, light and distance determine the experience of something as massive as a mountain, but can the expression of a mountain also be discovered in a close-up, or even in a single stone? The diversity of her images show how changeable our view of a seemingly static object can be.