German designer and photographer Tom Hegen is really interested in the consequences of human presence on Earth.
While Hegen was in the Netherlands, he decided to immortalize the huge tulip plantations, using aerial photography. Indeed, as he explains on his website, the country cultivates about two billion tulips each year. These flowers have a flowering period of three to four weeks per year, between April and May. Once the flowers have hatched, the growers use machines to cut the heads so that all the energy of the plant remains in the bulb and that the latter becomes stronger.
Contrary to what one might think, the sale of the bulb is a much bigger business than the sale of cut flowers. In the Netherlands in 2015, the number of tulip growers was 926, which makes the country the world leader in the flower trade: about 77% of the bulbs marketed come from the region.
From the sky, we notice that the industrialization of this culture has truly transformed the landscape that seems to have nothing natural. These images hypnotize us, make us lose all notion of scale and we face the absurdity of this over-exploitation of land.
