The Earth Crunches Beneath My Feet: Lisa Röing Baer

While the promise of the future of petromodernity disappears into thin air, our everyday life remains seemingly unchanged—and yet it bears the traces of profound change. This book captures that: a world that continues to exist in familiar images but has begun to unravel.

With her first monograph Der Boden knirscht unter meinen Füßen (The earth crunches beneath my feet), Lisa Röing Baer (b. 1994) presents a selection spanning 15 years of analogue photography and depicts an era that is drawing to a close. The everyday and the political often intertwine here, as hopes and disappointments stand side by side in images in which the past is inscribed as nothing more than a fading memory and the future appears uncertain. Light-flooded streetscapes, temples to consumption, landscapes—it is only when they are brought together that it becomes clear that Baer’s images do not provide a coherent narrative, but are interwoven as a visual matrix of tense associations that question any form of linear belief in progress.