There is a photograph by Frederick H. Evans from 1896, entitled “In the Attics,” in which the artist captures the improbably clean space of Kelmscott Manor, the home of Arts and Crafts movement pioneer William Morris. The photograph presents the attic as a type of raw liminal space, where the viewer can identify steps, timber arches, and a door leading outside. However, it feels contained, alluding to a space, due to the still nature of the photograph, that one cannot leave. Perhaps this is a bit too much projection on my part, but I see the space in Evans ‘ photograph as a closed, if beautiful, circuit. It is at once serene and claustrophobic for me, although I do not claim that this was the photographer’s intention. For better or worse, there is also a slight sense of vertigo presented within the angular framing of the photograph, and I can tangentially find myself arriving at the silent German Expressionist film by Robert Weine, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, from 1920, if I squint hard enough.

Of the other history of attic and loft photography, there is not a considerable amount, surprisingly, given how strange these spaces can be. I am reminded of Sarah Walker’s Pelči Manor (Perimeter Editions, 2019), a book that I also reviewed and realize now also invoked the same Evans photograph. Edward Weston’s 1921 photograph, Attic, also fits the remit for examination. However, it quickly falls into humanization with a figure holding our gaze, even though the sitter turns away, presenting a slightly eerie, or uncanny, element to the otherwise geometrically fixed attic space. Alfred Eisenstaedt was also given access to the attic of the Paris Opéra Garnier in 1930 to document the Swan Lake ballerinas as they cavorted in front of his lens, an unholy soft box light illuminating their pale skin backlit by the windows of Garnier’s building. Their presence is a further miasmatic slide into attic photography that is haunted or humanized.

I mention all of these attics for what they are akin to, rather than what they are precisely in proximity to, rather than what they are concerning, Bernhard Fuchs’s exceptional new book, Hayloft, published by Walther König. Haylofts are not attics, yet they share the same uncanny arrangement of space and yet are stranger as they also include the hay itself, which becomes a living, momentous organism in Fuchs’s book, replete with pareidolic tendencies—these large sweeping…clumps of hay form monstrously fantastic shapes that have haunted many children’s dreams. And yet, as they belong to farms, many of these spaces are slowly being eroded by the growing prevalence of factory farming and the gradual erosion of our moral right to govern our land in the face of corporate capture. These sullen and green spaces offer a refuge from the 21st century. They are alive with smells; they simultaneously evoke an area of uncanny melancholy but are present as a chamber of safety, play, and refuge from the constant machinations of the “progressive” outside world. They labor. They are a kingdom; they are a castle. They are safe spaces where the imagination flourishes, escape portals from the deadening of our digital intellect, from our wired status, and our constant need to consume images, information, and aesthetics.

These vast strongholds are as potent as any Richard Serra sculpture, any immersive Pipilotti Rist installation, and they are created not for aesthetic consumption but for utility, art imitating life writ large. I have memories of various haylofts from my childhood in the Midwest. Though I did not grow up on a farm or spend significant time in barns for which haylotfs preside, the small number of experiences that I had were indicative enough to give me the impression of their special character, which oscillates between the utility as mentioned above and the psychological lode they carry as a type of netherworld space where one can be safely haunted in their enclosure. I can smell Fuchs’s photographs of these spaces; they trigger an olfactory sensation that is unlike any other photographs, save for pictures of deep pine tree enclaves in the late autumn, sun piercing the veil of their canopy, disturbing the flora and fauna from the forest carpet, raising a particular hard-to-place earthy scent. These sensations, along with other uncanny allusions, have also influenced my thinking about his other great works, albeit in different ways.

It is imperative to discuss Fuchs’s brilliance as much as it is vital to discuss the Proustian arrangement that his Hayloft book presents. I am a fan of his work, which began with me hunting down a copy of Farms from 2012. That book, discovered on a trip to the Walther König shop in Cologne during a summer holiday in Brussels, completely blew me away. I think of it as a companion piece to Hayloft. There is a deep subjective load in that book that best describes the artist, perhaps even more than the subject matter, which, in many ways, is the caliber of work that I wish to engage with. I tire of people trying to tell me what to think when I look at the work. I tire of being locked into a series of “what it is aboutisms,” though I understand that tendency. With Farms, the mood, palette, and deep affinity for place are evident in the work. I believe it conveys a feeling more than an idea, and although I can discern some notion of the book’s implications, I am content to feel my way through the spaces, however they brood. One book that I have in semi-reference for people interested in rurality and the life of European farms is Christophe Agou’s In the Face of Silence, from 2010. Although it is a bit more cinematic, with people, and has a documentary tendency, it is also a valuable resource.

With Fuchs and his colleagues, Laurenz Berges and Simone Nieweg, I am given the chance to dwell in their photographs, to absorb the place within the frame, and to make my associations with it. I am reminded, in this work, of an incredible salted paper photograph by Eugène Le Dien of some olive groves from the 1850s, which I believe is lodged in the collection of either Hans P. Kraus or the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. The scene is as simple as it sounds: a grove of olive trees in albumen. Yet, the rich aubergine tones and the undulating shadows of the olive trees present a disorienting yet naturalistic effect (coined later by P.H. Emerson) that sweeps my imagination away to a different time. This can also be found in the work of Gustave Le Gray, a pioneer, along with Carleton Watkins, who exemplifies this tendency for me. In particular, it is Le Gray’s photographs of Fontainebleau, more than his (slightly overvalued in comparison) seascapes, that move me.

I was aware of Fuchs previously, but at a distance, I was not sure that I understood the work until it was in my hands. I remember spotting a copy of Autos from 2006 and thinking at first that it was strange that people would pay so much for a book of cars. After finally securing a copy, I experienced the same wariness, uncanniness, eeriness—whatever one might call it as I had from Farms. However, I admit Autos can chill the bones even further. These cars and trucks that dot the byways and hinterlands of the forest, left behind as their inhabitants search elsewhere on foot, present themselves as forensic, as though they could as easily be lifted from Swiss photographer Arnold Odermatt’s images of wrecks and disaster. However, in Fuchs’s images, they present as silent, with no impact, and yet that absence, as found in most of his work, unlocks the imagination to see symptoms of the scene, if not be gifted its answers.

With Hayloft, all of these aspects of Fuchs’ work are present. There is the patterned absence of humans. There is the possibility of unease, yet it cannot be confirmed. There is a way to see what is natural as something that, within, lurks an alternate possibility if one wants it to be. And finally, there is the space to roam, to play, and to imagine, something that cannot be underscored enough. I might also suggest that, with all the historical references, Fuchs’s photographs are less bound by the Düsseldorf School from which he comes than by the history of the medium. Of course, there are tendencies within that we might trace back to those years, but overall, I feel that the work stands alongside those artists, such as Evans and Le Dien, even more. In some ways, this work exhibits a late 19th-century aesthetic that I find refreshing rather than antiquated. Of his contemporaries, I have mentioned Nieweg and Berges, but his palette in Haylofts also shares the coppery green of Guido Guidi, even if the sunlight is absent here. That specific patina of aged bronze is very difficult to emulate, and I love that I can connect these two artists. These two artists can create great images where they stand, eliciting from their familiar life a sense of profound intimacy without a single soul other than the artist within the frame. This is one of the hallmarks of a great artist: that they can take from what is familiar and gift it back to others with great veracity, even when it is founded in the everyday.

Hayloft is one of Fuchs’s great works. I consider it slightly more elevated (pun intended) than Farms in its camerawork, color grade, and simplicity. That is not to say I do not see them as equal, just that there is something slightly fresher and more cohesive here that I adore. I also hold Autos very high on my rating scale for Fuchs, but that is a different story altogether. It will be hard for me to see other books this year that affect me as much as this big book of coppery hay. Books like this come along infrequently and bring me pure joy as I turn the pages and view the images. That alone, with all of the books I thumb through per year, should give you an indication of its essential nature. It has my highest possible recommendation, and you will feel silly when it sells out and gets expensive. In short, get a copy now.

There are English and German versions.