Michael Dressel, born in East Berlin in 1958, is a wanderer between American and German culture. His regular journeys between his home towns on the American West Coast and Berlin have sensitized him to recognize the social changes of recent decades more clearly than most locals. His second book shows his view of American society on the eve of a historic election. The Americans have a choice between sanity and madness, between an orderly civil state and increasing decay and chaos. From a Central European perspective, the choice seems clear, but to get a sense of the current state of mind of Americans, it helps to look at this book with its end-time title. Dressel's impressive images show a society on the edge of the abyss, marked by extreme nationalism, political polarization, religious fanaticism, gun mania coupled with paranoia and pervasive poverty and moral decay. His portraits are complemented by landscape photographs that speak their own gloomy language. Michael Dressel briefly studied set design at the art academy Berlin Weissensee. He spent two formative years in East German prisons following a failed escape attempt. After being released to the West, he briefly lived in West Berlin in 1985 before moving to Los Angeles, where he has been living ever since. Until recently he worked as a sound editor for big movie productions in Hollywood which among other things resulted in membership in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Since his retirement from the movie industry he shares his time between Los Angeles and Berlin when not travelling and photographing. His first photobook „Lost Angeles“ was released jointly by Hartmann Books and Gingko Press in 2022.

Artist Andrea Grützner (*1984 in Pirna) has been working on her photographic series at the Erbgericht Polenz, a country inn in eastern Saxony, for a decade. The building has fascinated her since childhood, and its name refers to some regional cultural history concerning jurisdiction, which goes back to the Middle Ages. Its interior contains a historically evolved collage of materials and spaces that have been linked to the memories and emotions of the locals since its opening in 1898. Andrea Grützner doesn't primarily show the familiar, nostalgic scenes and stereotypes of the province, such as the tavern decorated with antlers. Instead, she elaborately stages the deserted, angled interior in front of her analog camera, sometimes using colored flash lighting. The result is an avant-garde labyrinth of intensely colorful and luminous shadow geometries that superimpose fragments of space and objects in a painterly manner, while their magical realism simultaneously refers to the subjectively and collectively colored spaces of memories as well as utopian visions of space. The large, double-sided, abstract visual compositions, which are rotated ninety degrees in the book, create a playful, enigmatic sense of vertigo that gradually triggers a way to decipher things and perceive traces of use. The pull of this extraordinary pictorial cosmos is intensified by the implementation of the extended 7-color offset printing process and the tactile layering of different surfaces, reflecting the artist’s process.

After Nature – The Ulrike Crespo Photography Prize is a joint project of the C/O Berlin Foundation and the Crespo Foundation. Every year, the prize honors artists who explore new concepts of nature in photography and other visual media through their work. The accompanying publication presents the work of the first two prizewinners. Laura Huertas Millán (*1983, Colombia) deals with the cultural, medicinal, and ritual applications of the coca plant long before cocaine was first produced in nineteenth-century Europe. Based on the prohibition of the plant in the course of the Spanish colonization of Latin America, she develops a speculative narrative centered on a group of women who secretly distributed coca leaves in the seventeenth century. The artist uses fiction as a strategy, imagining a fragmentary narrative about the colonial appropriation of nature and the resistance to it. Sarker Protick (*1986, Bangladesh) focuses on the historical territory of Bengal, which today extends across India and Bangladesh. In his pictures, he translates his examination of the colonial history of the British Empire into a photographic investigation of the present. He is interested in the expansion of railroad connections and coal mining in the nineteenth century. Traveling through Bangladesh and India, he creates a body of photographs that addresses the global, geopolitical, and historical dimensions of imperialism as a key driver of the climate crisis.