Biography
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Erik Hijweege is a Dutch photographer whose work is driven by a profound fascination with the sublime forces of nature. His photographs explore the tension between beauty and power, fragility and permanence, and the human desire to understand landscapes that remain beyond our control.
Hijweege began his career as a photographer in 1998, following a longstanding curiosity about the natural world and the extremes of the landscape. His early projects took him from Africa to the storm systems of the American plains, where he photographed tornadoes and supercells. These encounters with overwhelming natural phenomena established a recurring theme in his work: the sublime as an experience that is at once awe-inspiring, beautiful, and unsettling.
Since 2013, Hijweege has worked extensively with the nineteenth-century wet plate collodion process. The slow and labor-intensive technique has become an integral part of his visual language, allowing him to create images with a distinctive sense of materiality and timelessness. He has used the process to photograph endangered species preserved in ice in Endangered, and to explore the idea of creating safer environments for threatened species in New Habitat.
His fascination with the sublime extends across a wide range of natural phenomena. In Nishikigoi, waterfalls become monumental manifestations of nature’s power. In Nibelungen, vast flocks of starlings form constantly changing, storm-like clouds in the sky, transforming an everyday natural event into something almost mythical. His Uncharted series evokes the experience of early explorers encountering seemingly untouched landscapes, while his use of a Petzval lens and wet plate photography reinforces the sense that these places exist outside ordinary time.
In Remote, Hijweege turns his attention toward the relationship between people and the sublime. Dwellings appear within immense natural environments, emphasizing both human presence and human vulnerability. The structures provide a point of scale against mountains, forests, deserts, or other vast landscapes, suggesting that our relationship with nature is ultimately one of coexistence rather than mastery.
Across his body of work, Hijweege continually returns to the idea of the sublime: nature experienced at a scale or intensity that exceeds everyday perception. Whether photographing tornadoes, waterfalls, endangered animals, migrating birds, or remote dwellings, he seeks moments in which nature becomes overwhelming and almost otherworldly.
His photographs invite the viewer to pause before these encounters—to experience wonder, uncertainty, and respect for a natural world whose beauty is inseparable from its immense power.
Monographs
- Noir, Uitgeverij de Verbeelding, 2004
- Human, Blurb 2009
- Supercell, Hatje Cantz, 2011
- Holland, Uitgeverij de Kunst, 2012
- Een eigen gezicht, Ella Editions, 2014
- Endangered, Ella Editions, 2014
- Spreeuwendans / Swirling Starlings, Waanders Uitgevers 2023
- Expeditieberichten, Walburg Pers 2025