Aindreas Sholz
Aindreas Scholz is a German-Irish photographer, lecturer and practice-led PhD researcher based in London, UK. His work explores experimental and cameraless photography, ecology and the environmental histories of photographic processes. He studied at TU Dublin and Goldsmiths, University of London, and is currently completing doctoral research at TU Dublin.
His practice has developed through residencies and fieldwork across the UK, Ireland, Europe and the High Arctic, and has been presented internationally through exhibitions, publications, workshops and public programmes. He is also the founder of The Ecological Wetroom™, an ongoing research project examining photography’s relationship to water, chemistry, waste and ecological responsibility.
Project
"The Most Beautiful Anthropocene" is an ongoing series of cameraless photographs made through climate-adapted cyanolumen processes using sunlight, expired photographic paper, plant matter and environmental waters, including acidic rain and pollution-affected seawater.
Rather than photographing landscape from a distance, I allow environmental conditions and materials to enter the photographic process directly. Flowers, grasses, seed heads and other fragile plant forms become collaborators, while water chemistry, solar exposure, temperature and atmospheric conditions determine the final image.
The resulting works oscillate between beauty and disturbance. Their saturated colours and delicate botanical forms initially seduce, but they also function as material traces of vulnerable environments. The series asks whether photography can move beyond simply representing ecological crisis and instead allow climate, matter and place to participate physically in the making of the image.
Statement
My practice uses climate-adapted cameraless photographic processes to make images as material records of environmental change. Working without a camera, I collaborate with sunlight, water chemistry, plant matter, soils and other environmental materials so that atmospheric and ecological conditions physically imprint the photographic surface.
I treat the photographic print as an ecological site in which human and other-than-human agencies participate in producing the image. Drawing upon early photographic experimentation while adapting these processes to contemporary environmental conditions, my work considers photography not simply as representation, but as material evidence of place, contamination, vulnerability and change.
I do not merely wish to represent climate change; I ask how photography, through its materials, methods and infrastructures, can become more active in responding to it.