The photographer Lukas Felzmann was fascinated by the very thing that some driving past would find boring, flat, and disconsolate: the vast Sacramento Valley, located just a hundred miles from San Francisco. Felzmann discovers with his camera the hidden charms of that seeming nonplace. For him, exploring a place means both walking around and lingering quietly, until the valley opens up like a book, with stories that cry out to be read and discovered. With his camera he traces how time, determined here by the growth of the plants, slows on the plane, and how the horizontality of the surface becomes a reassuring balance to the hectic city of millions nearby. The photographs show the diversity of the plane: the original landscape in its natural state, the large swaths put to agricultural use, the modern provincial towns, and the transitional areas in between. Photographs of water in all its facets run through the book, just as water runs through and forms a valley.

With marginalia by Angelus Silesius and John Berger