The series Whale Watching is a series of photographs that deals with the landscape of Lower Saxony on the outskirts of Bremen. The binding element of the series is the Airbus Beluga cargo plane, which appears in every picture – sometimes clearly, sometimes less visibly – as the protagonist. I am less interested in the aircraft itself. Rather, I see the work as a portrait of this agricultural and industrial landscape, the suburban idyll and the houses in Bremen’s flight path. It is a work somewhere between Wolfgang Tillmans’ Concorde and Heinrich Riebesehl’s agricultural landscapes.
In Whale Watching I am interested for the first time in the serial nature of photography: how often can I photograph what seems to be the same thing over and over again? At what point does my interest in the motif of landscape, architecture or aeroplane fade? 
Whale watching is fundamentally different from my previous way of working. For the first time I am working with digital photography, for the first time in series.

Christian Retschlag, born in Magdeburg in 1987, lives and works in Hanover, Germany.
Studied fine art at the Braunschweig University of Art in the classes of Prof Dörte Eißfeldt and Prof Corinna Schnitt from 2008 to 2013, followed by a study visit to the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, USA, in 2014. Master student with Prof. Eißfeldt 2014.
Retschlag has presented his work in several national and international exhibitions and has received various prizes and scholarships.