Boris Snauwaert’s new book, Rock. Bird. Fire, feels like a poetic continuation—and a deep distillation—of his earlier vision: not just a landscape to explore, but a tactile and intimate terrain of human gesture, nature’s remnants, and ephemeral presence. Where once the eye wandered through mountains as through a continuous panorama, now the gaze must dwell—more like a fingertip than a footstep—on smaller, quieter epiphanies.
In the earlier work, movement was key: “leaning the pages,” “crossing landscapes,” “going back and forth.” In Rock. Bird. Fire, the motion is internal, the rhythm more breath than stride. Here, each image becomes a kind of talisman, an object of pause and reflection, not passage.
This new form—a miniature book of folded prints—invites a different kind of journey: one where scale shrinks, yet meaning expands. The mountain is still there, but it’s become metaphor, abstraction, or memory. The hands holding butterflies become the new peaks—fragile, alive, subject to vanishing. The wrecked roof and fallen tree echo environmental erosion, but also internal collapse. Bird feet on a wooden pole hint at balance, perching, the moment before flight or fall.
If Rock. Bird. Fire is a landscape, it’s no longer geographic—it’s emotional and symbolic. Fire is the passion or the ruin; rock, the permanence or the burden; bird, the spirit or the watchfulness.
Snauwaert is shaping a kind of folk-poetic ethnography—not of a region, but of perception itself. His images are not explanatory but invitational. They don’t document; they suggest. They whisper rather than declare.
You could say he’s moved from the map to the memory. From landscape as distance to landscape as skin.
The 96 copies are pinted on the occasion of the show "Rock. Bird. Fire." at Studio Cluster
