Aindreas Scholz is the 2026 Denis Roussel Award recipient.
“I think your work is quite wonderful and that the camera-less images in your submission are primarily concerned with the crisis in our ecology, our responsibilities to the dwindling resources of our planet, and as you state in the work’s synopsis, “the relationship between historical and alternative photographic processes and the climate emergency.”
These painterly and gestural works have been symbiotically created using the simple iron-based cyanotype process — ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide in collaboration with polluted seawater, acidic rain and sunlight. Your images are alive… and likely impermanent… which I feel is entirely appropriate to the spirit in which they are made and what that impermanence represents. The seawater evaporates and salt crystals, the literal and fundamental essence of photography, form on the surface of the print. The textural beauty found in your prints represent 96.5% of the earth’s primary liquid, salt water, in an increasingly compromised transition, and in context, the destruction of what constitutes life… water and salt.
In ancient Rome, when a person was stricken by love, they were described as being in a state of salax, or in a salted state? Salt is also the reason some wild animals ended up domesticated, the only rock obsessively eaten by everyone, and the primary component in the discovery of photography. Those small facts make these salted images immensely personal and like most seductively beautiful things, they come with a warning.
I feel that their message, their warning, might be intensified by the scale of the images. Your installation shot is impressive and I’m guessing that the dimension of the construction is about 2.5’ x 9’ but what I would love to see, perhaps as a first contact in an exhibition, is a digital reproduction of a single image at a 40” x 60” scale. I believe the work is powerful enough in texture (your haptic term applies here) and coloration to command your viewer’s attention to the entirety of your exhibition.
Your work is, for me, profoundly beautiful and a warning of tragic consequences. In the spirit of Denis Roussel, your materials, concept and execution are integrated and among my favorite works in this year’s competition.” Christopher James
Our Interview with Aindreas
Would you please tell us about yourself?
I am an Irish-German photographer, lecturer and practice-led PhD researcher at Technological University Dublin, Ireland, but currently based in London, UK.
My practice centres on cameraless and historical photographic processes and their relationship to ecology, climate and material responsibility. I am particularly interested in what happens when photography is understood not simply as an image-making technology, but as a physical encounter between light, water, chemistry, weather, plants, minerals and place.
Much of my recent work has developed through fieldwork in coastal, island, desert and Arctic environments, alongside my ongoing project The Ecological Wetroom™, which asks how photographic practice might become more conscious of water use, chemical residues and environmental impact.
Where did you get your photographic training?
My formal education has developed across Ireland and the UK, including a BA (Hons) at Technological University Dublin, Ireland, an MFA at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK, and postgraduate teacher training at University College London, UK. I am now undertaking my practice-led PhD at TU Dublin.
But much of my photographic education has also come from years of darkroom work, teaching and experimentation.
Historical and alternative processes reward curiosity. You learn by making, observing, changing a variable, making again, and gradually understanding how materials behave. Failure is often one of the most useful teachers.
Who has had an influence on your creative process?
Anna Atkins and John Herschel have been important historical points of departure, particularly in thinking about cyanotype as something produced through contact between specimen, chemistry, water and light.
I am also interested in artists such as Meghann Riepenhoff, whose work allows environmental conditions to participate directly in photographic production, and Alexander Hamilton, whose long engagement with cyanotype, landscape and ecological thinking has been important to me.
Increasingly, though, I would say that places themselves influence my creative process. Seawater, rain, wind, sunlight, soil, iron, salt and changing weather conditions have become collaborators rather than simply subjects.
Please tell us about an image, not your own, that has stayed with you over time.
One image I continually return to is Anna Atkins’s cyanotype of Laminaria digitata, a large brown seaweed commonly known as oarweed or tangle.
There is something extraordinary about the directness of the image. The plant was physically present in the making of the photograph; it is simultaneously specimen, subject and image-making tool. Yet what remains is an absence, a pale botanical trace surrounded by Prussian blue.
My recent research into different surviving impressions of Atkins’s work has also made me interested in repetition, reversal, migration and the physical lives of photographic objects after they leave the hands of their maker.
What image of yours would you say taught you an important lesson?
An early work from And So I Watch You From Afar taught me not to treat unpredictable material behaviour as failure.
As seawater evaporated from the cyanotype, salt began crystallising across the surface of the paper. My first instinct was to wonder whether these deposits should be controlled or removed.
Instead, I realised that the salt was perhaps one of the most important parts of the image.
The sea had not merely participated in producing the photograph; part of it had physically remained behind.
That moment changed how I approached the entire series. I became much more willing to allow water, chemistry, weather and material instability to determine the final image rather than forcing the photograph towards a predetermined idea of perfection.
Please tell us about the work you submitted to the Denis Roussel Award.
The work comes from my ongoing series, And So I Watch You From Afar, made using climate-adapted cyanotype on archival watercolour paper with salt residue.
I began with the nineteenth-century iron-based cyanotype process but adapted it to particular environmental conditions. The works are produced through a collaboration between ferric ammonium citrate, potassium ferricyanide, sunlight and waters gathered or encountered through fieldwork, including pollution-affected seawater, acidic rainwater and waters affected by environmental disturbance.
Rather than treating water as a neutral substance used simply to process the photograph, I began asking what happens when its mineral content, salinity, acidity and contamination become visible within the image itself.
In some works, seawater and its mineral content remain materially present within the image, leaving salt deposits and crystalline traces across the surface of the paper. These marks are not decorative additions, but evidence of the environmental conditions that participated in the work’s formation.
The works are therefore not conceived as entirely static objects. Their surfaces may continue to respond to humidity, time and their surroundings, and I am increasingly interested in that instability because it reflects the ecological conditions the work addresses.
I do not want simply to illustrate climate change. I want environmental conditions to participate materially in the photograph.
The resulting images can be seductive and beautiful, but that beauty carries a warning. Water, salt and photographic chemistry become part of a fragile material system that points towards increasingly compromised ecological environments.
What part of image-making do you find the most rewarding?
The moment when a process does something I could not have completely predicted.
I normally begin with a conceptual framework, a place, material or ecological question, but the most interesting work often happens when the chemistry, weather or material pushes back against my intentions.
A stain, crystallisation, colour shift, spill, or unexpected reaction can become far more meaningful than the image I originally planned.
That negotiation between intention and accident is probably what I find most rewarding.
How do you work through times when nothing seems to work?
I try not to divide experiments too quickly into successes and failures.
Practice-led research has taught me that an unsuccessful photograph can still contain extremely useful information. I document experiments, change variables, and often return to results months later.
Sometimes what initially appears to be a mistake becomes the beginning of a new process.
I also step away from the darkroom and return to the open landscape, walking, collecting materials, reading or working with another process. Moving sideways often produces a solution more effectively than repeatedly forcing the same experiment.
What tools have you found essential in the making of your work?
Light, paper and water are probably my most important tools.
I work with traditional cyanotype chemistry, archival papers, brushes and trays, but sunlight, rainwater, seawater, minerals, salt and atmospheric conditions frequently determine what the photograph becomes.
A notebook is equally important. I record exposure times, weather, water sources, material changes and unexpected reactions because many of these works emerge from accumulated observations rather than from following a fixed recipe.
The simplest materials often become the most significant.
Is there something in photography that you would like to try in the future?
I am increasingly interested in using photography to encounter and interpret landscapes that have been visibly shaped by human activity, whether through extraction, pollution, industry, erosion or climate change.
I want to continue working in places where the distinction between the natural and the human-made has become increasingly difficult to separate, and to explore how photographic processes might respond to those conditions without simply documenting them.
For me, the future lies in allowing place, material and environmental change to shape the work, while continuing to question what a landscape photograph can be in a period of profound ecological transformation.
How does your art effect the way you see the world?
It has made me pay much closer attention to things that might otherwise be treated as background conditions.
I notice the quality of water, salt deposits, the colour of soil, iron staining on rocks, changing sunlight, erosion, vegetation growing on disturbed land, or the place where freshwater meets the sea.
Photography has made those things visible to me not simply as subjects, but as interconnected systems.
My practice has increasingly convinced me that an image is never produced by the photographer alone. Every photograph depends upon materials, energy, water, infrastructures and environments.
Recognising those relationships changes both how I make photographs and how I move through the world.
What’s on the horizon?
I am continuing to develop And So I Watch You From Afar alongside The Ecological Wetroom™ and my PhD research at Technological University Dublin.
Recent Arctic fieldwork in Svalbard has opened an important new direction in the practice, particularly around glacial water, seawater, iron-rich soils, coal, twenty-four-hour daylight and photographic processes adapted to rapidly changing climatic conditions.
This October I will also be undertaking a Peter E. Palmquist Memorial Fund-supported research trip to New York, focusing on Anna Atkins and nineteenth-century photographic collections. The visit will also include an artist talk at Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York and a practical cyanotype and book-making workshop at the Center for Book Arts.
Christopher James’s suggestion of encountering one of the works at a much larger scale has also stayed with me. I would very much like to explore what happens when one of these surfaces is enlarged to an immersive scale, allowing the salt formations, gestures and material traces to become almost landscape-like in themselves.
More broadly, I want to continue bringing together historical research, ecological responsibility and material experimentation, while asking how photography might respond materially, rather than simply representationally, to a changing climate.
Thank you Aindreas.
To learn more about the work of Aindreas Scholz please click on his name.
