Bernd Walz & Gundula Walz
Rural Areas
When we talk about countryside these days, all too often we connect with this term the romantic image of an idyllic world. However, reality is so different. Cities and towns expand into rural areas. Additional land use by industrial areas, business parks, opencast mines, wind farms, transport routes etc. transform rural landscapes and nature dramatically at cost of a healthy environment and biodiversity.
We can just complain about these developments, but perhaps it is better to face up to the problems, to minimize them and to engage in realistic landscape and nature protection.
My images in this project illustrate humanly transformed landscapes in rural areas. Their aesthetic side leave an ambivalent feeling giving the fact that these landscape scenes are the result of seemingly unstoppable landscape transformation.