Landscape Boundaries

photographs and text by
Ineke Key

The landscape in the Netherlands is continually changing, precisely because it is so densely populated. Towns and cities encroach upon the unspoiled countryside. Industrial parks and roads are springing up in places where cows once grazed. With the on-going industrialization and urbanization, new buildings and high dividing walls obscure age-old places from view.

Provided that cultural and social aims are being sufficiently served, we tolerate and indeed preserve these places, stripped of their original function, and now misplaced in the landscape. At the same time, differing environments draw ever closer to each other, sometimes even becoming intertwined. Walls, fences or sound barriers are designed to segregate these "conflict areas" from one another.

It is the tension in these "borders" in the continually changing Dutch landscape that drive me to make these photographs.

—Ineke Key