The Leipzig-based photographer Hans-Christian Schink (*1961 in Erfurt) first gained notice for his series Verkehrsprojekte Deutsche Einheit, for which he spent seven years documenting new traffic-related constructions in eastern Germany. The images bear testimony to humankind s enormous intervention in the environment. This clash between civilization and nature is a recurrent theme in almost all of Schink s work: be it telephone cables that appear in an apparently virgin Vietnamese jungle, or utility poles and wires strung across Niigata s snowy landscape. Even if human beings, as the perpetrators of these interventions, are never directly seen in these photographs, the scars they have left behind make them ever-present. Yet Schink does not pass judgment: he simply documents the scenes from the perspective of a remote observer.
