Landscape has played a central role in the history of photography, initially serving as a means of capturing the grandeur of nature and the sublime. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, photographers such as Carleton Watkins and Ansel Adams depicted landscapes as untouched, majestic spaces, aligning with a romantic vision of natural beauty and technological perfection of its documentation. Their work, reminiscent of classical oil paintings, presented mountains, rivers, and forests as pristine and eternal—existing independently of human intervention.

A stark departure from this tradition came with the New Topographics movement in the 1970s. The groundbreaking exhibition at the George Eastman House’s International Museum of Photography in autumn 1975, featuring eight American and two German photographers (the Bechers), introduced a new approach — critical and aesthetically challenging.  Although positioned as "neutral" in style, the landscapes they captured did reflect a clear stance of the people behind the lenses: rather than presenting untouched nature, they showcased human-altered environments—parking lots, coal mines, water towers, warehouses, and storage silos. Such a view foreshadowed the rise of capitalism and the growing perception of nature as a resource to be conquered, shaped, and exploited by political and economic forces.

Today, landscape photography remains a platform for social commentary, and to prove this point one does not have to go far. A prime example is the work of Andreas Gursky, a German artist renowned for his meticulously composed, large-format architectural and landscape photography. Blending traditional documentary language with digital manipulation, Gursky creates hyperreal images that critically engage with themes of modernity, consumerism, and globalization. Questioning the objectivity of what we actually (don't) see, already in the late 1990s, his panoramas foresaw the Cartesian crisis we are clearly facing nowadays.

Gursky’s Rhein II exemplifies this tension between utopia and anti-utopia. Digitally stripped of buildings, roads, and other human-made elements, in this photograph the river is transformed into a purified abstraction, evoking serenity, order, and the meditative aesthetics of minimalism. Yet, this idealized vision is ultimately an illusion—a landscape that does not (or actually has never) truly existed. It is the world celebrating human control and, reflecting authoritarian, corporate, and capitalistic visions of a "perfect" world, it feels lifeless. Eerily prophetic, isn’t it? And in such landscapes of Gursky’s I do see a new landscape — that of our inner doubts, fears and searches, as well as our unfulfilled longing for simplicity. The shift from aesthetic appreciation to critical observation is ongoing, and unfortunately, the societal and ecological concerns that shape these artistic explorations continue to intensify.

Max Sher’s recent project Snow follows in this tradition of critical landscape photography. His images of the snow-covered city of Kars—featured in an exhibition at Berlin’s aff gallery and the eponymous photobook "Snow"—initially appear serene and subdued. However, his detached, observational style, reminiscent of the artists like Stephen Shore, Alec Soth, Mark Power, and Alexander Gronsky, clashes with the detailed captions that reveal the region’s troubled history of war and conflict.

"Over the last century and a half, this area has seen multiple wars, devastation, migrations, tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of deaths, annexations, colonization, destruction, ethnic cleansing, displacements, and dispossession," comments Sher. "After four previous attempts, it was annexed by Russia from the Ottoman Empire in 1878 and, up until 1918, was part of the Russian Empire—a period known in Turkey as ‘forty years of black days. Located in the historical region of Western Armenia (Eastern Anatolia), it became part of the first Republic of Armenia in 1919. Only two years later, however, the nascent Republic of Turkey and Soviet Russia, led by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and Vladimir Lenin respectively, negotiated and drew the new border between them behind the backs of Armenia in an attempt to overcome centuries-old rivalry between the empires that had just disintegrated and to establish friendly relations. The latter, thus, was forced to cede this territory and become a puppet rump state within the Soviet Union, crushing the aspirations for self-determination and self-rule of the smaller nations unfortunate enough to get caught in between."

Sher first explored Kars and its layered cultural history in 2009. Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he returned to the subject, reexamining the empire’s history of aggressively reshaping the landscapes and identities of those unfortunate enough to share its borders. What he saw and tried to photograph in Kars was, in his own words, "a familiar and sad imperialist pattern that, tragically, is being revived today with every passing day".

Snow, as a metaphor, carries significant weight in Sher’s work. The recurring motif underscores themes of temporality, erasure, and isolation, simultaneously obscuring and revealing human intervention in the environment. More pointedly, given the project’s critique of Russian expansionism, snow can also symbolize the lack of accountability among authoritarian leaders—a visual metaphor for the "turning a new leaf" rhetoric that has often served as a tool for historical amnesia. This tactic, chillingly familiar from World War II aggressors, allows perpetrators to bury the past rather than confront it.

"It happened, therefore it can happen again," wrote Primo Levi more than half a century ago. If we permit collective amnesia—allowing the metaphorical snow to obscure the traces of empires' violent pasts—history will inevitably repeat itself. A censorship-"retouched" anti-utopia will become reality.

"When I went to Kars in 2009, I was sure this was all a thing of the past and was more concerned about changing my own Orientalist perceptions but unfortunately these imperialist struggles and so-called geopolitics are back to fulfill egos and ambitions of a handful of aging and power-hungry men, is now maybe more relevant though both are tightly connected to each other," wrote about his photobook Max Sher, and, while scrolling through news from around the world, I cannot but agree. We are really connected but what connected us is not only the brotherhood of dictators. It is in our own power to get connected by the language of art, criticism and resistance, to embrace the universality of the landscapes that surround us, to teach ourselves to see through the storm and snow. Otherwise the price of blindness might be too high. Again.

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