For over thirty years the Zurich-born, San Francisco-based artist Lukas Felzmann has been
making poetic images that explore the intersection of the natural environment and human life.
Across and Ground present two new photography books by Felzmann which, like an epic
landscape poem, take us on an allusive journey through a scarred landscape.

Ground weaves together a series of black-and-white topographical details of California’s
fifty-eight counties to form a conceptual atlas of images bound by an invisible grid. Using a
large format view camera, Felzmann follows the border of the continent to the edges of small
towns, capturing the liminal zones of nature and culture. Reflections on each site by the
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Forrest Gander guide us through the territory.

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In Across Felzmann sets aside the grid and roams freely, collecting signs of human activity.
From foothills to highways, in windows and reflections, across floodplains and focal planes,
his lush sequences of photographs explore the notion and construction of place as much as
the medium of photography itself. An essay by photography historian Corey Keller illuminates
Felzmann’s visual language.

Felzmann says, “In my photographs, the geographic locations are secondary to their function
as stage settings, as possibilities for something to unfold. As I crisscrossed the territory,
returned back to the studio and went out again, my interest was both the outside and the
internal. Not only a journey across land but also across time and the process of photography.
Over time, the imagery became more painterly and referential to the photographic process.
And yet, I think of photography as a sculptural process, where space and time have to be
fitted onto pieces of film, which Peter Pfrunder once called “thin sheets of longing” – a
description I find fitting, because they can hold the very concrete and the only imaginable
both at once.”

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ACROSS & GROUND
Edited by Lukas Felzmann
Photographs by Lukas Felzmann
With contributions by Forrest Gander and Corey Keller
Design: Lukas Felzmann with Integral Lars Müller
Two volumes
20,3 × 30,5 cm, 8 × 12 in
384 (236 + 144) pages, 169 + 72 illustrations
Hardcover and paperback in slipcase

Lukas Felzmann is an artist working with photography, installations and books. He was
born in Zurich, Switzerland, and lives and works in San Francisco. He taught photography at Stanford
University for two decades and is now an affiliated scholar at the Bill Lane Center for the American
West at Stanford University. Felzmann’s work has been shown in exhibitions in Europe, Egypt, Columbia, China and the United States. He has been awarded several grants from the Swiss Government, the National Endowments for the Arts and recently a Guggenheim Fellowship. His six previous books are: Landfall, Waters in Between, Swarm, Helix, Gull Juju and Apophenia.

Lars Müller Publishers is a leading independent publisher of books on architecture,
design, contemporary art, photography and society, based in Zurich. Founded in 1983 by the
Norwegian designer Lars Müller, the publishing house has made a worldwide name for itself for its
beautifully designed and rigorously researched publications. The publishing program is presented as
a “school of seeing,” bringing together authors, architects, designers, and artists whose work
encourages us to look at the world around us in new ways. As well as publishing significant
contemporary works, the publisher makes seminal 20th century works in the field of design and
architecture available through its program of facsimile editions “XX: The Century of Print.”
www.lars-mueller-publishers.com