Historically, two of the most relevant subject matters in photography have always been landscapes and still lives. Both disciplines experience interesting new developments recently, are placed in new contexts and are utilized to convey new messaging. At Paris Photo 2022, Robert Morat Galerie, Berlin, presents a curatorial concept that assembles works by four contemporary photographers whose practice has given them distinguished positions in their respective fields.

"12 Hz" - the lowest sound threshold of human hearing - suggests imperceptible forces, from plate tectonics to the ocean tides, from cycles of growth and decay in the forest to the incomprehensibility of geological spans of time. The photographs in Ron Jude's (*1965 US) "12 Hz" allude to the ungraspable scale and veiled mechanics of these phenomena, while acknowledging a desire to gain a broader perspective, beyond the human enterprise, in a time of ecological and political crisis. "12 Hz" consists of images of lava tubes and flows, tidal currents, glacial ice and welded tuff formations: pictures describing the raw materials of the planet, those that make organic life possible. Jude's photographs do not attempt to tell us how to live or what we have done wrong, nor do they reduce the landscape to something sentimental, tame and possessable. Rather, thev endeavor to describe and reckon with forces in our physical world that operate independently of anthropocentric experience. The photographs in 12 Hz work in service to a simple premise: that change is constant, whether we are able to perceive it or not.

Hannah Hughes's (*1975, UK) work explores the relationship between image, sculptures and language, focusing on the potential of negative space, and the salvaging and re-use of discarded materials. Her practice involves strategies of fragmentation and reconstruction. Her two-dimensional collages are often described as either flat sculptures or sculptural photographs. The shapes in the collages originate from outside edges and negative areas surrounding figures and objects, which have evolved into an ongoing regenerative alphabet of forms. She uses materials that invite the memory of everyday touch, such as paper stocks used in glossy magazines, pulp packaging and clay. This focus on tactility positions the work in relation to the boundaries of the body, and the spaces created where bodies intersect with their surroundings. She examines edges within the photographic image, capturing movement through internal layers and seams.

New York-based artist Bill Jacobson first became known for his defocused portrait and urban landscape photographs which, in the 1990s, addressed feelings of loss in the midst of the AIDS crisis. Subsequently, from 2003 through 2016, the work shifted and became sharp, focused, and delineated. Now in his 60s and thinking about both mortality and the uncertain times we live in, Jacobson is again exploring out-of-focus imagery, and the gallery is pleased to include three works from his new series titled "When is a Place". These landscape images, dreamy and otherworldly, were taken in 2018 in Virginia and in 2019 in the South of France. This new work also marks Jacobson's return to analog silver gelatin printmaking after a twenty-year hiatus.

Color and form, light and shadow - the images in Jessica Backhaus’(*1970 DE) series "Cut Outs" are created using the basic elements of photography. In her previous publication "A Trilogy" (Kehrer, 2017), she took a path into abstraction that is consistently continued here - using altogether photographic means: Cut out transparent papers are arranged on a paper backdrop, exposed to the sun and photographed. The papers react to the intense heat, deform, rise, contract, cast shadows - a summer's dance.