#landscape

#landscape

The 2025 Minimalist Photography Awards Landscape winners prove that in a noisy world, simplicity can strike the deepest chord. These photographs rely on quiet power rather than spectacle, reducing scenes to pure elements of space, light, and emotion. Martin Rak claimed 1st Place with Art of Winter, a serene Czech landscape capturing the hush of the season's first snowfall, while Kalle Saarikko's 2nd Place Whirl and Alexandre Brisson's 3rd Place infrared Dreamscape of Etosha showed how abstraction and surreal color can reshape our sense of place.

It's no secret by now that Iceland is one of the world's greatest destinations. First-time visitors drive jaws agape around the ring road, marvelling at the primal landscapes being moulded in front of their eyes, ancient to us but younger than most other countries on Earth. Repeat visitors delve into the hidden corners of the country, immersing themselves in the small towns that cling to precarious coastlines, undertaking epic multi-day treks, and discovering that every fjord, valley, and mountain heath holds something wonderous.

Three colossal planks of sandstone, ranging in height from fifteen feet nine inches to eighteen feet eight inches, rise from the grass, along with a smaller stone that has the bent shape of a boomerang. In contrast to the rectilinear blocks at Stonehenge, the Stenness megaliths are thin slabs with angled upper edges, like upside-down guillotine blades. Remnants of a ceremonial circle, they are placed twenty or more feet apart, creating a chasm of negative space.

In words immortalised by noughties pop icon Natasha Beddingfield, "I want to run with the wild horses." Of course, in the song, the horses act as a metaphor for unbridled freedom and joy, and, in any case, where would we find a harras of horses just meandering the open plains in the UK? If this were a film, we would cut to a wide shot of a car driving the undulating roads of the New Forest, miles of woodland stretching out

It isn't just McEwan's elegiac, indeed patriotic, attentiveness to English landscapes to the wildflowers and hedgerows and crags, to the infinite shingle of Chesil Beach, to the Chilterns turkey oak in the first paragraph of Enduring Love. Nor is it merely the ferocious home counties middle-classness of his later novels, in which every significant character is at the very least a neurosurgeon or a high court judge, everyone is conversant with Proust, Bach and Wordsworth,

Undulating in a Utah Museum of Fine Arts gallery, thousands of glimmering casts seem to float throughout the space. For his large-scale installation "Stone on Boundary," Japanese artist Yasuaki Onishi has suspended 5,000 copper foils that he molded over river rocks in both Osaka and Salt Lake City. Begun in the artist's studio in Osaka-a city where Japanese copper has been refined for export for around two centuries-the installation then traveled to the museum, which sits less than an hour's drive from the world's largest operational open-pit copper mine.

Artworks inspired by chess boards, landscapes, and nature by Sydney-based artist Sasha Krautman. Chess is a game filled with contrast, order, mystery, luck, and fate. For Krautman, there's a lot of symbolism to be found in one game, even in one simple black and white pattern. Her collection consists of 12 chess board-style art pieces, each bringing together 2 images that simultaneously oppose and fulfill the other.

The elliptical lotus pool of Tadao Ando's Honpukuji Temple (Temple of Water) was built in 1991. The upper level is open-air and roofless, while the circular vermilion sanctuary with its Buddha statue lies underneath the pool, accessible by a staircase that bisects the lotus ellipse.' Photograph: Will Aitken A squacco heron spears a fish in the river between Namibia and Botswana.' Photograph: Barry Thomas

The question arising in the office is what initial equipment is needed to start gardening, with the wheelbarrow being the suggested essential tool.