Bernhard Lang: a beautiful disaster

Is it possible to experience a moment of aesthetic emotion when faced with the industrial exploitation of nature? This is what German photographer Bernhard Lang is asking with his abstract painting-like aerial photography. All these landscapes bare traces of man’s presence often irreversibly so: from the phosphate mines in Florida to the beaches of the Adriatic, flooded with mass tourism.

And yet there is no cynicism in the photographer’s approach: the seduction that his pictures prove is above all an invitation to grab our attention, perhaps, to realize the extent of the devastation that they are depicting.