Above Untitled from Dune. (©Misha de Ridder/Courtesy of Lay Flat).

Dreary are they heavens and boisterous is thy shore,
Bare are thy dunes and plain they fields galore,
Nature was created by thee with a stepmother’s hand, —
Still, I love thee dearly, oh my Land!

‘Holland,’ 1832. E.J. Potgieter (1808-1875)

Sitting like a natural no-man’s-land, the dune’s of The Netherlands occupy a space between the raw unbridled seas, and the vulnerable polder landscape. Here one is able to  step away from the wind swept beaches, and enter an undulating landscape of tranquility, which contrasts with the flat landscape beyond, a landscape that one normally associates with the Netherlands. 

For Dutch photographer Misha de Ridder, who has travelled extensively, producing work in the United States, Switzerland, and sub-arctic Norway, the natural landscape; and in particular the world’s areas of wilderness, function as a means to make art, ‘like a blank canvas, paint and brushes in one.’ In his latest work, Dune, de Ridder focuses on the Waterleidingduinen or water pipe dunes — which occupy 3,500 hectares on the outskirts of Amsterdam — which like other areas of dunes, stand as one of the last vestiges of wilderness, in an otherwise man alter landscape.

Above Untitled from Dune. (©Misha de Ridder/Courtesy of Lay Flat).

‘My work is made from the perspective of someone who lives in a city and wants to know how to relate to wilderness,’ writes de Ridder, ‘to the greatness of nature and in the end to the nature of his own existence and inevitable death. Working slowly with a large-format camera, the colour and black-and-white images that form Dune are not awe-inspiring, or grand — like those encountered in de Ridder’s other works — but a far more intimate and personal reflection of the landscape.

In one photograph, the last splinters of warm evening light, illuminate the low dense scrub of the dunes; in another the red foliage contrasts with an icy blue sky; whilst in another image, sun floods into the top right of the photographic frame, bringing an intense glow to a woodland otherwise bathed in deep shadow. In these images, de Ridder frequently eliminates the horizon or skyline from his photographs to enhance the two-dimensional plane, de Ridder invites the viewer to enter a meditative state within the terrain, and nature itself.

Dune is published by Lay Flat in an edition of 750.