NEW YORK, NY.- One of the most brutal legacies of modern warfare is the land mine. The Earth is littered with over 100 million of these weapons of destruction with most of them remaining active and potentially lethal long after the conflict is over. In Minescape (Daylight Books), photographer Brett Van Ort documents the legacy of land warfare on the social and natural landscape of Bosnia where the presence of land mines continues to render many portions of the country impassable seventeen years after the conclusion of the Yugoslav wars. Minescape is being published to coincide with an accompanying exhibition on view at the VII Gallery in DUMBO, Brooklyn from April 18 through May 24, 2013. A talk and book signing with Van Ort will take place at the gallery on Thursday, May 2 at 6:30 p.m. as part of a DUMBO Art Walk evening.

In Minescape, Van Ort presents meticulously composed, painterly photographs of large swaths of the bucolic countryside of Bosnia that are still infected by munitions and land mines. The beauty of the landscape belies the horrors hidden beneath the surface, making the work deeply unsettling and disturbing. Adding to his compelling approach to the subject, Van Ort couples his pristine landscape images with chilling photographs of land mines, as well as prosthetic arms, fingers, and metal joints that remind us of the human costs of the mines.

The mines and prostheses are presented against stark white backgrounds resembling product shots in an advertisement. Van Ort provides clinical details such as name of manufacturer, use, and cost to produce. We learn the average cost of a mine is under $10, while the price of a prosthetic arm is over $4,000. In the 1990s, over 150 countries signed the Ottawa Treaty calling for the "Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction." Among the 35 countries that abstained from signing the treaty were the United States, China, India, and Iran. At the back of the book Van Ort presents the details of the Ottawa Treaty along with a list of the signatories and non-signatories.

TED Books has released a companion ebook to Minescape entitled Minescape: Waging War Against Land Mines. The ebook pairs Van Ort's photographs with globe-trotting investigative essays and multimedia features detailing the continued impact of land mines as well as innovative techniques for land mine detection. For more information, visit http://www.ted.com/pages/tedbooks.This initiative marks one of Daylight's first projects that are part of the just launched Daylight Digital (http://www.daylightdigital.com).

Brett Van Ort was born in Washington D.C. and raised and schooled in Texas. He moved to Los Angeles, California after obtaining an undergraduate degree in film from T.C.U. He worked as a camera assistant and camera operator for several years on various films, television shows and documentaries, most notably Errol Morris' Oscar winning The Fog of War. Working on that film pushed him away from narrative film structure and closer to the documentary. Van Ort moved to London in 2008 and received his M.A. in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at the London College of Communication shortly thereafter. Spending his summers on the farm where his mother grew up instilled a great respect for nature in him from a young age. Van Ort has always been interested in land, the outdoors and how we as humans use the environment to our benefit and detriment. Many of his personal projects focus on the landscape, interaction with our environment, and what is concealed by nature. He moved back to Los Angeles in 2012 to continue a project about toxic soil in America and the destruction of the high desert by the housing crisis.