I’ve never seen war photographs like Jo Röttger’s. The structure of his project Landscape and Memory is familiarly photojournalistic — Röttger accompanies a German military unit as they train in Saxony-Anhalt, deploy to Afghanistan and return to Germany — but the work is an unusual hybrid of genres. Rather than the fast and portable handheld cameras typically used in war photography (from the Leica to the cell phone), Röttger works with a 4x5 view camera, a slow and cumbersome piece of equipment, unsuitable for capturing moment-to-moment action but loved by landscape and architectural photographers for its exceptional detail and depth. With this camera, he applies the syntax of landscape photography to a subject that is traditionally the domain of photojournalists. 

These themes pervade Röttger’s project, which opens with a pair of images from the Afghanistan war. In the first, we see the silhouette of a soldier atop a vehicle, his machine gun pointed toward an implausibly starry sky; another soldier is sheltered inside the vehicle, illuminated by a red light and the glow of a monitor. The machinery of war is set against the infinite unknown. The second image shows a standoff on a rocky road between a military utility vehicle and a shadowy figure — likely an Afghani but it’s hard to say — obscured by the dust and sunlight. The man seems barely real, an apparition in the glare of the desert.