Between the Mountain and the River by Rick van der Klooster

Jagged mountain ridges stretch across the horizon like the spine of the earth, guiding the eye toward a vanishing point suspended in mist. A quiet mountain lake, cradled between stone and sky, evokes the shape of a womb — a symbol of origin and return. Barren tree roots twist and sprawl with an almost frantic energy, as if seeking something just beneath the surface. In Between the Mountain and the River (2018–ongoing), photographer Rick van der Klooster (1995) captures a landscape that is at once hauntingly beautiful, unsettling, and deeply symbolic — a terrain where memory and meaning entwine.

Van der Klooster’s connection to this region runs deep. As a child, he spent countless school holidays in the Alps of western Austria with his mother, who died unexpectedly in 2013. It was only in the wake of her passing that he fully realized how sacred that landscape had become — not just a holiday destination, but a shared sanctuary. After her death, he avoided returning, held back by a fear that setting foot there would mean losing her all over again. Instead, he visited her in dreams: she sat on a wooden porch framed with red geraniums, speaking softly about death, time, and letting go.

In 2018, five years after her passing, Van der Klooster returned to the mountains with a camera in hand and a heart heavy with longing. As he wandered through high forests and along the ridgelines, the landscape seemed to speak to him. In rustling pines and whispering streams, he heard his mother again — not as a memory, but as a presence. Nature mirrored his grief, yet also offered unexpected solace. “The landscape returned to me what I had lost,” he would later say. The photographs he made over the next five years serve as meditations on absence, presence, and the quiet ways the world holds onto us, even after we’re gone.

Between the Mountain and the River reflects Van der Klooster’s enduring search for metaphor in the natural world. More than a scenic backdrop, the mountain becomes a threshold — a place where the veil between life and death grows thin, and the spirit persists. Through this body of work, Van der Klooster elevates nature to something sacred: not merely a site of beauty or nostalgia, but a vessel of memory, a source of meaning, and a quiet companion in the human need to remember, grieve, and find hope.