Winter landscapes serve as a source of inspiration for many photographers, yet Kilian Schönberger stands out markedly from the rest. In addition to an evident talent, he has one further distinguishing quality — colour blindness.
Kilian Schönberger is a geographer and professional photographer from Germany, widely known abroad for his work with National Geographic and CNN. He was born in 1985 in a small town called Tönnesberge, where from childhood he was surrounded by untouched forests. His closeness to nature, and its elusive, mystical beauty, instilled in the photographer a love of brooding landscapes.
"I am colour-blind — I cannot distinguish red from green," writes one of the finest landscape photographers working today. One might expect this to be an insurmountable obstacle to his career, yet Kilian developed his own distinctive approach to shooting. Unable to focus on hues, he directs his attention to detail, texture and form.
For Kilian Schönberger, the act of photography is a kind of meditation — a search for communion with nature. It was in that spirit that he conceived the series Winter In Squares, finding his inspiration while travelling through remote corners of Central Europe.
"Some people do yoga; I climb mountains in the pre-dawn silence, stepping one by one into my own quiet world," he writes on his Facebook profile.
Winter In Squares is a celebration of winter as it draws its white blanket over forests, mountains, houses and the roads that lead to them. Vivid colours fade, yielding to a stark interplay of black and white, as snow and ice take a once-living landscape captive in their frozen grip.
Each photograph is part of a mesmerising story — a fleeting detail of a larger picture that Kilian Schönberger allows us to glimpse, a journey we take alongside him.
Merging into a single whole, the winter landscapes of the series form a unique composition suffused with ephemeral beauty and a note of melancholy. Kilian Schönberger creates photographs whose mood can be felt on a purely sensory level — images that capture all the magic and poetry of winter.
Photography and rights belong to © Kilian Schönberger
If you enjoyed this article, take a look at Soviet Architecture in the Guise of Snow Ghosts. Incidentally, landscapes hold just as much photographic interest for Kilian Schönberger as urban architecture. We invite you to explore his series of images from the city of Hoiss, titled Stiftung Insel Hombroich.
