The Approach
I'm Sebastian Schulze Baek — a fine art nature photographer based in Germany, working in remote landscapes worldwide.
For a decade, I worked as an economist and sustainability consultant. Today I'm part-time studying landscape ecology, slowly reordering my life toward the places I photograph — learning to read landscapes not only through a viewfinder, but as living systems: species, water, stone, time.
Fern & Flare grew out of three encounters.
Vastness
In 2012, I stood in the American West for the first time and felt something I had no word for yet: a deep, quiet awe. The sense that we are a small part of something immense and ancient — and, too often, something tamed. I have returned some fifteen times since, mostly to the high country between the Rockies and the Sierra. Wyoming and Montana above all. That feeling has never left. It is where this work began.
Deep time
On Hawaiʻi, geology stops being abstract. Standing above the clouds on Haleakalā, diving along the flanks of old volcanic craters, I felt how old and enduring this world is — and how briefly we fragile beings pass through it. The land carries the memory of ages. We are here for a moment of it.
Life
On the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica, I found a density of life I had encountered nowhere else. Everything lives — and death is present everywhere. It struck me as the purest form of existence: everything living, everything passing, impermanence woven into every leaf.
Our civilised world overstimulates us too — with screens and noise that pull us out of the world. The rainforest does the opposite. Its sounds, its scents, its movement claim every sense at once, and the overstimulation is natural: it is the original state of being. Part of this world. Exposed, like every other species.
The work
These encounters shape how I photograph. I move slowly, return to the same places across seasons, and try to listen more than to take. Animals are not subjects to me — they are expressions of the same life that forms forests, rivers, mountains and our own bodies. Nothing stands alone. Nothing is merely background.
I am not interested in speed, drama or constant stimulation. What guides me is restraint, attention and care — and, increasingly, the ecologist's way of seeing: an image is better when you understand what you are looking at.
My images are made for the land they emerge from, and offered to others in the hope that seeing can become a form of connection, and connection a form of care. To feel the beauty of life is, for me, the first step toward protecting it.
Fern & Flare holds this meaning: to move outward into the world, guided by light — and to return with traces of what was felt.
