Photographer Aleš Jungmann is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this photo essay. From the project ‘ZIMA 2023’. To see Aleš’ body of work, click on any photograph.

Landscape photography, to me, is a form of research—a search through the space that lies beyond the boundaries of my familiar, civilized presence. It unfolds at the margins of the city, modernity, technology, and progress. Once, the original landscape may have held the key to a deeper understanding of relationships and events. Today, it feels forgotten—irretrievably lost. The bond between human and landscape has been severed. Our senses, dulled by limited use, have all but atrophied.

In the ancient world, landscape was part of a cosmic order—a divine and aesthetic space, perceived not only with the eyes but with the entire body. One could feel the wind on the skin, hear the sound of running water, sense the smell of damp earth beneath one’s feet. The landscape was a natural continuation of human existence.

Today, this relationship has been disrupted. As Leo Spitzer writes, landscape has changed from a projected harmony between man and the world into a fragmented space of alienation. Our sensory perception of landscape has been reduced to a flat image—overloaded with information we no longer know how to read. I stand alone in the landscape, overwhelmed by an excess of sensations, yet disconnected from it.

Through photography, I attempt to grasp the chaos—the disarray of branches, the tangled wildness of undergrowth, the impenetrable density of forest. This chaos is not only visual, but internal, rooted in a weakened perception of the world. I approach it using the method I know: as a professional architectural photographer, I project into the landscape my photographic habits—an optics of order and structure. I apply the precision I’m used to when photographing urban space: controlled composition, emphasis on structure, the relationship between light and form. But the landscape does not respond obediently to this rationality as architecture does. It is irregular, elusive, resistant to my intention. And it is precisely in this tension between order and wildness that the meaning of my exploration is born.

Photography thus becomes an act of reduction—a search for hidden order within disorder. Ordo ab chao. Careful and patient clearing is not an act of destruction, but one of hope: an attempt to approach something essential that may still endure beneath layers of time, forgetfulness, and dulled perception. It is an attempt to return to the landscape not only as an image of outer reality, but as a space to be experienced again with the whole body, with one’s entire being. I remain before the gate—at the edge, at the beginning. But I am determined to continue.

MgA. Aleš Jungmann was born on September 11, 1971, in Liberec, Czech Republic.

He trained as a photographer and later continued his studies at the Film and Television.

Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU) in Prague, Department of Photography, graduating in 1997. He entered the school as a documentary photographer and gradually turned his focus toward landscape photography.

Alongside his academic work, he began photographing architecture and soon became a successful architectural photographer. Today, he collaborates with Czech and international architectural studios, developers, publishers, and magazines.

Since 2004, he has held the title of QEP (Qualified European Photographer).

After a long period of artistic abstinence, interrupted only occasionally, he is now returning intensively to landscape photography—with renewed energy and passion, shaped by years of architectural work and using the same medium format.

All images and text © Aleš Jungmann