Kanarische Landschaften II - e

The Kanarische Landschaften II series presents the Canary Islands landscape in monochrome, a decision that reorders the visual priorities of the subject. In colour, the volcanic terrain carries warm, distinctive tones – amber, ochre, red – that tie the image to its specific geography. In black and white, those ties are loosened: the landscape resolves into light, dark, and atmosphere, and the formal organisation of the image becomes more apparent.

In Kanarische Landschaften II – e, this loosening is most fully realised. The foreground is a broad, pale plain – almost white at its brightest – receding slowly towards a low horizon where dark formations mark the edge of the plateau. The sky above is heavy with clouds but carries a diffuse, even light spreading across the upper portion of the image. The result is a composition of exceptional spatial openness: nothing interrupts the horizontal, and the eye moves freely across the full width of the picture. It is perhaps the most formally spare of all the Kanarische Landschaften works.

Produced in 1971 in an edition of 50, the Series II prints are among the more tightly held of Richter's early photographic output. The presentation – a small photograph mounted centrally on a large cream-white sheet with a pencil border – allows the image's openness to hold against the surrounding field of white.