As we step into spring, I’m sharing four books that kept me company through the colder, darker months. Carrying stories of land, its flora and fauna, each publication explores how deeply nature is intertwined with our sense of time, place, and self. These are tales of resilience, pride, and inherited wisdom; of truth sustained through landscapes and the people who inhabit them. Join me on a journey through the desolate Australian outback and Palestinian olive groves, uncover the layered histories of New York’s green guardians, and share a midnight feast with squirrels and mice beneath the moonlight.
Adam Ferguson: Big Sky
Spanning over two million square miles, the Australian outback dominates approximately 73 per cent of the country’s landmass, yet only 5 per cent of the population calls it home. This vast, enigmatic landscape has long been romanticised and poetically depicted in popular culture. In Big Sky, published by GOST Books, photographer Adam Ferguson challenges these sentimentalised narratives with a raw portrayal of the rural heartland’s realities. Over the course of a decade and a 30,000 km journey, the artist set out to capture the true essence of this immense, red-hued expanse.
Ferguson, renowned for his coverage of international geopolitical conflicts – including the US-led war in Afghanistan in 2009 – felt a strong pull to return to his native country. Raised in regional New South Wales until the age of 12, he described his journey home as a “self-prescribed therapy”, a way to reconnect with the landscape that shaped him. Navigating through remote bushlands, small towns, farmlands, and both operating and abandoned mines, the photographer’s lens remains fixed on the people who inhabit these spaces. Farmers, ringers, shearers, convicts, a war veteran, a drag queen, and a kangaroo shooter; children, teenagers, and elders – all find their place within the frame, their lives etched into the parched, unforgiving terrain and the neglected, sun-scorched buildings. White Australians and Aboriginals are rendered with equal dignity and presence, as Ferguson pays homage to the land’s rightful custodians. “This was, and always will be, Aboriginal Land”, he highlights in a short text at the beginning of the book, underscoring that to speak of the outback is to acknowledge those who have been its stewards since time immemorial.
Big Sky dismantles the romanticised image of the remote interior, exposing its scars and struggles. Scattered carcasses of killed animals, the dark presence of gold and opal mines, environmental degradation manifesting through relentless droughts, bushfires and floods – Ferguson documents a landscape at the mercy of human intervention. Stark images of discarded waste and the haunting sight of hundreds of dead fish accumulating along the Baaka/Darling River, victims of water mismanagement, remind us of the fragile balance at stake.
The physicality of the book itself mirrors the landscape it portrays – its large format feels almost as vast as the land it seeks to encapsulate. The satin dark blue cloth cover, embossed with irregular silver dots, evokes the night sky – a nod to the Aboriginal star maps used to navigate and memorise waypoints. Aboriginal traditions speak of singing the land into being through songlines. As I leaf through Ferguson’s stark, unembellished images, I am reminded of the Aboriginal belief, highlighted in Bruce Chatwin’s book Songlines: “if the songs are forgotten, the land itself will die”. The degradation Ferguson captures – parched earth, poisoned rivers, and the relentless scarring of industry – compels us to ask: is the land’s slow decline a reflection of forgotten traditions? Have we lost the indigenous wisdom of nurturing and coexisting with the land, replacing it with exploitation and neglect?
Big Sky is an invitation to rethink the human relationship with the land – to move beyond the romantic illusions and see the outback for what it truly is: vulnerable but resilient, and so deeply intertwined with the stories of those who call it home.
Adam Ferguson: Big Sky has been published by GOST Books.
Lia Darjes: Plates I-XXXI
During lockdown in 2020, German photographer Lia Darjes found herself breastfeeding her first baby, staring absentmindedly at the garden outside her window. Suddenly, she was startled by an unexpected visitor – a squirrel that leapt onto the table. “It was instantaneous”, she later recalled. “This disturbance on the table, which can so easily become a stage”. This fleeting encounter sparked a project that would unfold in her own and her friends’ gardens, using a waterproof camera triggered by movement. Carefully arranged and illuminated by flashlights acting as spotlights, the table settings became theatrical scenes, inhabited by an ever-changing cast of sparrows, crows, mice, cats, squirrels, snails, ladybugs and other creatures – each playing their part in an unscripted yet perfectly timed performance.
Inspired by the Dutch masters, Darjes’ carefully curated compositions are rich with detail – patterned floral tablecloths and pale linens contrasting sharply against dark backgrounds, their soft textures juxtaposed with the reflective surfaces of steel pots and glassware. Vibrant fruits – watermelons, grapes, oranges, strawberries – sit alongside remnants of meals: toppled glasses, stained napkins, and stacks of dirty plates. Though these arrangements appear meticulously curated, the presence of animals introduces an element of chaos, eager to feast on the leftovers left behind.
The theatricality of the book extends beyond the imagery to its design. The velvety green cover, reminiscent of stage curtains, features embossed silhouettes of animals on its soft fabric, inviting the reader to enter this miniature world of staged disorder. The title and author’s name, delicately printed in a soft pink hue, add a touch of whimsy to the otherwise dark and moody aesthetic.
Throughout the pages, birds, mice, cats, bugs, and squirrels take central stage – some caught mid-act: a squirrel stretching its tiny paws to grasp a grape, a cat with its head half-submerged in a cup, or a snail inching along the inner surface of a glass, almost touching the leftover liquid. Others appear eerily composed, seemingly unfazed by their surroundings, as if posing deliberately for the camera. There’s an undeniable charm to these moments: a comical image of a pair of outstretched cat legs disappearing off one side of the frame while a half-eaten cake sits abandoned on the other; a squirrel arriving too late to the feast, its hesitation almost palpable. In another, a cluster of ladybugs gathers around a table cluttered with paints, papers, and brushes, creating an unintentional masterpiece of their own.
Plates I-XXXI is a joyful, lighthearted exploration of the fragile boundary between humans and the natural world; an attempt to bridge the silent gap between us and the creatures we live alongside but rarely engage with. A gentle recognition that no space is ever truly ours alone.
Lia Darjes: Plates I-XXXI has been published by Chose Commune.
Magali Duzant: A Tree Grows in Queens
Trees, like people, hold stories – some passed down through history, others imprinted in one’s own memory. Magali Duzant’s A Tree Grows in Queens is a small but multilayered publication that merges personal narratives, historical anecdotes, and ecological reflections into a mosaic of arboreal knowledge. Stemming from the leafy past of the artist’s native New York City, the book unfolds as an intimate archive of human-tree relationships, tracing the lives of green guardians that have been gifted, planted, uprooted, mourned, guarded, celebrated, and immortalised.
Duzant’s stories are a mix of fact and folklore, ranging from the American chestnut blight – a botanical pogrom unleashed by imported Japanese chestnuts carrying a fatal fungal infection – to the origin of tree-hugging as an act of resistance, which, though often linked to the hippie movement, actually traces back to the Chipko movement of 1973-74 in India, where activists quite literally embraced trees to prevent their destruction. The book often reminds us that to talk about arboreal beings is, inevitably, to talk about justice – urban foliage canopies, for instance, serve as a stark marker of inequality. Wealthier neighbourhoods in NYC, shaded by abundant greenery, are naturally cooler, while lower-income communities, often home to people of colour, suffer from a lack of foliage cover, making them more vulnerable to extreme heat.
The small publication reads like a stroll through a forest – each turn of the page revealing a new curiosity. Some chapters take the shape of a poetic encyclopaedia, offering etymologies and species histories, while others are deeply personal, triggered by spotting a certain bark-bodied local in Queens and letting it unravel a thread of associations. Trees, after all, have been entangled with human life across centuries, appearing in myths and folk tales, like those recounted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, frequently quoted throughout the book.
Blended into the text are sepia-toned images that deepen the book’s nostalgic undertones – most of these stories are about the past, after all. Trees are cut, moved, afflicted by disease, or simply age into quiet deaths. Some, however, continue to hold power even in absence, like the Harlem Wishing Tree, whose remaining stump fragment sits on a pedestal at the Apollo Theatre stage, where performers still rub it for good fortune. “If a tree can bring luck to the hand of the person touching it, can that hand bring something to the tree?” Duzant muses, and the question really sticks with me. Can it?
A Tree Grows in Queens closes with a collection of archival photographs and hand-made collages – images of people in relation to their green companions: resting against them, admiring, hugging, reaching out to them, as if to exchange something intangible. But don’t we all carry a tree story of our own? Flicking through the book’s pages, I found myself tracing my own encounters with these rooted neighbours – some more vividly remembered than the people who passed through my life.
“Touch can be a form of activism,” we read on one page. A Tree Grows in Queens leads us to step outside, admire our wooden co-habitats, listen to their rustling leaves and swaying branches, trace our fingers along their trunks, and perhaps, to recall Duzant’s own reflection, offer something back in return.
Magali Duzant: A Tree Grows in Queens has been published by Conveyor Studio.
Adam Broomberg & Rafael Gonzalez: Anchor in the Landscape
This is a story about trees so deeply connected to the lives of people that their strength and endurance have become indistinguishable from those who care for them. These are trees spoken of as children, passed down through generations – trees whose survival ensures the survival of those rooted beside them. In Palestine, olive groves are more than sources of livelihood; they are family, memory, and culture. And it is precisely because of this bond that their destruction has become a deliberate tactic of oppression.
Anchor in the Landscape is the result of a two-year collaboration between South African artist and activist Adam Broomberg, of Jewish descent, and German-Spanish photographer Rafael Gonzalez. Together, they travelled across the West Bank in 2022 and 2023, photographing centuries-old, silver-leaved giants. What emerges is a monochrome set of portraits – each one given its own full page, its own presence, its own coordinates. The trees are rendered in exquisite detail, their gnarled trunks and twisted limbs standing in alleyways, on rocky slopes, beside cemeteries, and beneath unfinished construction. Some are bent low, nearly horizontal to the ground, others split in half, scarred by time, weather, fire, or violence – yet still alive. Some stand alone, while others appear among kin, in groves or scattered on distant hillsides. You can’t help but wonder: which of them still stand today?
There’s something deeply moving and sacred about the way these trees are seen. No spectacle. No forced emotion. Just patient, reverent looking. Broomberg, a former anti-apartheid campaigner and co-founder of Artists + Allies x Hebron, understands the weight of what it means to bear witness. He has long used art to confront systems of control and erasure, particularly within contexts of colonial rule. His work here continues that practice, documenting the ongoing dispossession and obliteration of Palestinians.
One can’t help but read Anchor in the Landscape as an archive. A eulogy. A reckoning. An estimated 10 million olive trees are growing across the occupied West Bank, and over 100,000 Palestinians depend on them for their livelihood. Olive oil and its by-products make up the region’s largest economic sector. And yet, these groves are persistently under threat. Between 1967 and 2012, at least 800,000 olive trees were uprooted by Israeli authorities, according to the Applied Research Institute Jerusalem. From 2005 to 2013, over 200 more were cut or vandalised by settlers. In the past two years alone, the violence has escalated – not only against the rooted elders but against those who tend to them. Farmers have been shot, beaten, and displaced. Some of the crooked sentinels photographed in this book have already been confirmed as vanished since the publication launched. How many more will disappear, alongside their carers?
Broomberg has described the act of photographing his subjects as something slow, tactile, and personal. “Some of these trees you know intimately”, he told The Guardian, “because, to take one of these pictures, you must go up with a light meter. You have to touch the tree; you have to spend time with it because it takes an hour to take a picture”. That intimacy radiates from the pages; they are heavy with the grain of bark, the texture of light caught on aged wood. The absence of colour draws your eye into each crevice, each fold in the trunks. And yet, around the edge of the pages, the vivid red endpaper sometimes peeks through – bright and piercing, the only trace of colour, like blood in the margins.
What Broomberg and Gonzalez have created extends far beyond the bounds of a book. It’s an archive, a piece of history recorded in cellulose. A Memoriam. A chronicle of injustice. A visual love poem. A black-and-white silent cry. An ode: to resilient trees, to the resilient people who nurture them, and to their beloved, scarred land.
Adam Broomberg & Rafael Gonzalez: Anchor in the Landscape has been published by MACK.
The book is officially sold out, but copies are still available through Blackwell’s and Waterstones.
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