This Site explores landscape transformations in one of the world's largest lignite coal basins, the German Lausitz region (Lusatia). The Lausitz is a good example for studying such transformations because the affected area is vast, the transformations are highly visible, and a lot of creative energy and resources are devoted to shaping and enlivening the landscape after the mining is over.

Mining landscapes cannot be returned to the status quo ante, and it is usually impractical (or impolitic) to conceal their scars. Reclaiming the land therefore involves not only physical but mental interventions: new ways of seeing need to be cultivated in order to help the public engage with the new environment. This makes the Lausitz an experimental field both for landscape design and architecture and for landscape perception and use. My photography participates in a dual role: as a documentary medium recording physical change, and as an artistic and didactic medium that helps shape perceptual attitudes and practices.

Land reclamation plays out very differently in different parts of the world. It runs the gamut from serious, progressive efforts at ameliorating ravaged landscapes and living conditions to thinly veiled PR stunts aimed at distracting from the continuing rape of the land. To take an interest in reclamation is not to condone the relevant mining practices, nor is it to take a stand on "clean coal" or on any of the more general environmental issues involved. Just as looking into water cleanup doesn't make you a stooge of the chemical giant upstream, so looking at mining reclamation doesn't automatically make you a stooge of big coal.