Frank van der Salm has become known for his photographic works of the landscape in the broadest sense of the word. His recent exhibition at the Nederlands Fotomuseum showed a diverse oeuvre about the control of the metropolitan landscape, lack of space, infrastructural problems and the pressure on time and space in contemporary metropolises, a reflection of our way of communicating and its speed.

EENWERK shows a small part of his landscape photographs taken in Switzerland, which illuminate a completely different world. Away from the hustle and bustle of the metropolis, van der Salm shows a world of tranquility and deceleration. The 19th-century critic and painter John Ruskin believed that the mountains mark both the beginning and the end of the entire natural landscape. Since time immemorial, mountain landscapes have been seen as an inhospitable and awe-inspiring wilderness: as places that should be feared, respected and revered. In this capacity, this natural phenomenon also found a place in our art history, when many artists during the Romantic period tried to capture the grand and sublime appearance of mountains.

Van der Salm goes further. He shows sublime, majestic and poetic images based on our collective memory. But above all, he presents the landscape as a visual entity, a landscape that breathes and lives. He shows the depth and density of space complete with the apparent experience of smell and sound. The almost tangible silence is the (attractive) force of this series of works. Now that our ecological footprint is so emphatically in the news worldwide, these monumental works acquire a very current urgency.