Bernhard Edmaier

The nature photography of Bernhard Edmaier rests between landscape photography and land art. They’re pictures of the earth as we’ve never seen it, authentic and beautiful, but also without any romanticism or esotericism. Edmaier arranges his painting-like compositions through his choice of distance from the subject alone. Through extreme close-up or a remote view, arctic seas, rivers, volcanoes, cliffs, lava fountains, sulfur vapors, colored saline lakes or salt springs appear abstract. There is evidence of the phenomena of geologic evolution that only the learned geologist can identify and interpret. The pictures, in which people never appear, nevertheless seem to speak of them and their cultural history. It’s like being reminded of an antique floor mosaic, a modern color-field painting, or sensing echoes of the Op-Art of the 1960s.

Press Commentary

"The print of time on the skin of the Earth. Splendid."
GEO Paris, France

"Bernhard Edmaier raises the art of aerial photography to new hights. His images are hauntingly impressionistic, even as they display a clarity of tone
and texture that recalls the sharp-focus realism of Eliot Porter…"
Natural History Magazine, USA

"…environment becomes Art … The unspoilt landscape turns into artistic
expression in the images of Bernhard Edmaier, engineer and geologist. He has
become one of the most prominent photographers in the world. He has improved the standards of aerial photography and has contributed to a greater understanding of the earth’s crust."
La Stampa, Italy

"Bernhard Edmaier has given us a new perspective to natural landscapes …
The deep beauty of these scenes cries out of stewardship..."
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in LIFE Magazine, USA

"Bernhard Edmaier is the most interesting aerial photographer in the world...He rediscovers the world for himself and for us...Pictures that astonish, pictures as we’ve never seen before...Pictures that tell of the force of nature and time processes in a peculiar way, so grand that our power of imagination can hardly grasp it... Edmaier’s pictures are hyper-precise and at the same time enchanting in an abstract way. They’re hymns to the beauty of nature. The pictures of this photographer are like a song that announces the magnificence of our planet.
"ARD Kulturweltspiegel"

The world of Bernhard Edmaier is full of color ... he’s flown over glaciers and canyons, arctic seas and deserts and reeled in photos of these planets that no painter could have dreamed up with more fantasy.
"Süddeutsche Zeitung"

Phenomenally beautiful ... The opulent handiwork is a photo study in totality. ... Geographic art from the most enchanting.
"Bild der Wissenschaft"

... Bernhard Edmaier shows us the world as a luminously bright color palette – breathtaking aerial photos and close-ups of nature’s structures ... If color could explode: Bernhard Edmaier’s nature photography recalls action paintings. This time in his compositions the photographer choreographs nature’s intoxicating colors to 'Symphonie Phantastique,' ventures anew into the abstract presentation of landscape, which his last pictorial book already presented as a singular adventure in nature photography. ... as if geology was a department of art history."
fotoMAGAZIN

Exhibits (Selection)

Books/Catalogs (Selection)

Earthsong, Phaidon, London und New York, 2004
GeoArt Deutschland, BLV, München, 2003
Atelier Erde - Farbstudien, BLV, München, 2000
Geoart - Kunstwerk Erde, BLV, München, 1998
Eisige Welten - Im Kosmos der Minusgrade", BLV, München, 1996
Vulkane, BLV, München, 1994

Additional Information

The Struggle of the Line against the Surface. Bernhard Edmaier’s Landscape Photography from the Ground Zeroes of this World


In the years after the Second World War, when painters threw the echoes of the destruction and the internal conflict of an entire generation onto their canvases, they scratched the trauma of a nation into centimeters-thick paint, literally taking on the tensions and precipices into art’s canon of forms. From time to time, nothing occurred to the critics but to speak of these works as landscapes, and to describe these explosive depictions of a spiritual life in turmoil as frozen seas, dreary deserts and erupting volcanoes.

Today, it’s not uncommon that the shocking paintings from those times are looked at for their aesthetic aspects alone. The language of abstract art is so familiar to us, so comfortable too, that we began long ago to search for its beauty everywhere, not least in nature. As a result, Bernhard Edmaier’s more than 100 landscape photos in his book “Geo Art” show that frozen seas, dreary deserts, and erupting volcanoes can be described as totally abstract and meaningless. Forms wrestle with one another, lines fight against surfaces, rivers pour out colors, flaking off layers, dissolving contours and tearing textures. Portrayals of nature become landscapes of the soul.

Bernhard Edmaier studied geology and became a photographer through apprenticeship. His first books were dedicated to such comprehensible topics such as volcanoes and glaciers; they were specialized books of exciting beauty. In "Geo Art" he swapped the emphases. Now the artistic dimensions stand in the foreground. What he attempts is “to visualize the fascinating aesthetic of a dynamic earth.”For this reason Edmaier heads to the skies. From helicopters and airplanes he photographs the world vertically, preferably where no one lives or no one can live. What follows in this edition are torn clods of earth in ice floes like the crinkled structures of lava fields; windswept dunes in the Namibian desert; the eroded sandstone cliffs of the American Southwest: all examples of the forces of nature that have been forming ever since the earth’s beginning - photographs of the tides of time that one has to measure in decades, sometimes in millennia. However, no landscape book could be timelier. Because it is more than just taking stock of the last wildernesses; it also conveys a world picture, in the figurative sense of the word.

Edmaier’s representation of the supposed eternal becomes the current location search of our time. In doing so he alludes to topics such as the oft-lamented isolation within a callous society and the fashionable discovery of the benefits of slowing down. He plays with the esoteric notion of particular places’ spiritual energies and questions the possible gains in understanding derived from a fusion of poetry and science; whether he “can put forth nature with the abstraction of structures,” principles laid bare. Again and again the pictures veer between agitated emotion and sober documentation. It’s a double-play that Edmaier masters – and it’s more than just a fascination. Behind it hides a world view of “Yet…“ The photos possess a meditative quality but also divulge a restlessness. They play witness to desire and asceticism, to gravity and lightness, proximity and distance, life – and death. Which makes them timely: they lead to the ground zeroes of the world, regions where the viewer believes he can escape from the weight of his own history, to places where there’s no reference to former times. As a result one thinks that from there, one must be able to create anew, unencumbered. In short, one believes these must be the dream places at the end of a millennium.

But the picture tilts again, because naturally it’s to be understood from the photos that geology has its own history, its own processes. The surfaces are constantly reshaped. What we see are in no way moments of calm but rather, without exception, landscapes in upheaval. Edmaier thwarts the speed of our time with time of geologic dimensions. That too is a commentary, because he conveys with it time, the world and its beauty in the randomness. What remains is longing.

(Freddy Langer, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 10.6.98)


So near in the far distance

I was recently in London, in the Tate Modern...I passed a circle of stones, jagged rock lay on the floor; on the wall, a painting with the title "Waterfalls." We walked around it, got on our knees, and looked at the work very closely. The white veins in the crags, the mountain of stone, the sharp edges. Is it nature? An artificial nature without people?

People, and certainly not groups of people, are not found in Bernhard Edmaier’s photography. Someone told me that he too was recently in London, in this museum, three days in a row. Richard Long’s circle of stones is one of his favorite works there, next to Beuys, Kandinsky and Matisse. Matisse is said to have told his students once that they should sit themselves in an airplane and observe the world from above. Bernhard Edmaier likes this story. The world from above..

It’s an unusual world in Bernhard Edmaier’s pictures. Deserts, rivers, volcanoes, seas, cliffs captured from the air. Who has ever seen the Oster Lakes (in Bavaria) from above, a glacier’s ice stream in Alaska, a lake of melted snow and ice from a volcano in Iceland, the alluvial plains of Australia’s Kakadu National Park, the salt springs in the salt marshes of Tanzania?

Is someone trying to again decode the blueprint of the earth, substituting forms and colors and constructions for ACTG, something that could also be of interest to architects? There is a difference: architecture needs the horizon. Edmaier’s pictures can easily do without it. Because that which we see perhaps follows a blueprint, but one that isn’t drafted for people. The earth, in all its shades doesn’t need people.

Something which cannot be seen speaks to me in Bernhard Edmaier’s pictures. They are extremely gutsy pictures. Not because he flies swooping down through turbulent air currents over bubbling volcanoes, peering through a viewfinder. No, it’s because he resists a great temptation. No "mother earth" esoteric, no "the world is so beautiful” romance and no "save the planet" slogans hide in the pictures. For that one can easily reap applause. To the contrary: we see the destructive processes of the earth, the changing of the surfaces.

We see an oscillation from near and far, we see how landscape stops being landscape; a shimmering green serpentine that evokes the Holy Shroud; a saltwater lake like a painting; characters written on the desert. Edmaier, the geologist, plays with near and far, with distances. We no longer know where we are, how far away we are, or how large or small something is that we’re seeing. The earth becomes an expanse, the artist arranges colors and forms in the viewfinder of the Hasselblad. The way to painting isn’t far.

And it’s still a game. A game with time. Bernhard Edmaier (totally a geologist) shows geological developments that elapse over millions of years. That’s the reason that humans don’t appear. His pictures are without people because their meaning disappears in comparison to geomorphic evolution. Man is not the center of the world...Time becomes indistinct here, perhaps it even disappears.

I don’t want to continue now to hoist Bernhard Edmaier’s work into art history or even into the theoretical. Here is someone on a journey, whom the maelstrom of abstraction has seized, but who is held by the knowledge of geology. …

By the way, the white in Richard Long’s rock in the Tate Modern is quartz- or calcitadern. The stone itself is "English sandstone." Bernhard Edmaier told me. Go ahead and ask him also about Beuys or Kandinsky. You can learn a lot.

(From Hubert Filser’s speech at the book presentation "Atelier Earth. Color Studies" and the opening of the eponymous photography exhibit in the Architekturgalerie, Munich, August 2000.)

The Artist on his Work. The Photographer’s Afterward, in "Geoart – Artwork Earth," BLV, Munich 1998

Is it just a sober visualization of the earth crust’s various surfaces that are shown in GeoArt, or is it landscape photography on the search for buried beauties of nature, a picture journey through the supposed known world to the relics of a terra incognita? I don’t understand the term “landscape photography“ as the tasteful arrangement of “painting-like“ landscapes, even less as the attempt to hold up the myth of undisturbed nature. Perhaps my intention is best expressed with a quote from my famous colleague Andreas Feininger: "I observe the objects of nature first with the eyes of an engineer who is fascinated with the relationship between form and function, and secondly, with the eyes of an artist on the search for what we generally call ‘beauty,’ because we have no precise definition for this phenomenon.”

In realizing the GeoArt photo project, I intentionally defied an anthropocentric perception, even if it has become the measure of all things in our trade. Because it’s precisely in the areas that are hard to access and are hostile to humans that “inanimate“ nature retains its unbelievable variety of forms. My commitment was reinforced through the comforting realization that good ole humans are still completely insignificant in these regions.

The age old desire to see the world from above also influenced my photographic ambitions. It’s with the bird’s eye perspective that the dimensions and abstractions of the structures that the earth brings forth first reveal themselves. Be it products of principles or artworks of happenstance – our planet becomes an aesthetic fascination.