A "best of" edition of the wildly popular project featuring found photography of women in trees
"I don’t understand how you can walk past a tree without being happy," says Fyodor Dostoyevsky in his novel The Idiot. Perhaps this thought may explain the motif of women in trees, which was popular between the 1920s and 1950s. The enthusiastic collector of anonymous photography Jochen Raiß (1969–2022) discovered these motifs on flea market excursions, and has assembled them together in this publication for readers to peruse. Following Raiß’s wildly popular Women in Trees (2016) and More Women in Trees (2017), this volume gathers some of his favorite images from his 25 years of collecting this charming photographic genre. Whether the women are cheerfully dangling their legs, casually nestling in the branch forks or athletically climbing to the treetop, each picture has its own story to tell. From boxes containing numerous snapshots of other people’s lives, wildly jumbled together, Raiß pulled out black-and-white photographs of women gazing into the camera’s eye from dizzying heights and in surprising poses.
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Based on the anonymous flea market photography collection of Jochen Raiß (1969–2022), Women in Trees highlights a motif that had, until the first edition of this beloved 5 x 7 hardcover, previously gone unremarkedupon, but which is immediately recognizable to all who encounter it now. “Ostensibly, the photographers didn’t have any particular aesthetic intention,” Raiß writes, “and yet, a number of them have created images that possess a remarkable depth and beauty: looking at the camera, a woman is standing a little bit higher than the photographer in the fork of a branch. She is leaning back in the tree and because of the interplay of light and shadow her body virtually melts into it. Is it the pattern of her dress or the shadows of the leaves that we see on her skirt? When looking at the photo, it becomes a hidden-image picture. Boundaries seem to dissolve, and the branches and arms, the woman and the tree, overlap. The chance composition of this picture is perfect. The tree’s obstinacy does not allow for the woman to take any other position; surely, she wasn’t deliberately arranged in the tree in that manner. That an image of such fascinating aesthetic quality has been created from this chance arrangement is why I consider it a masterpiece.” continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 5 x 7 in. / 112 pgs / 52 b&w. LIST PRICE: U.S. $24.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $36 ISBN: 9783775758345 PUBLISHER: Hatje Cantz AVAILABLE: 2/25/2025 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: NA LA
Published by Hatje Cantz. Text by Jochen Raiß, Johanna Adorjan.
A "best of" edition of the wildly popular project featuring found photography of women in trees
"I don’t understand how you can walk past a tree without being happy," says Fyodor Dostoyevsky in his novel The Idiot. Perhaps this thought may explain the motif of women in trees, which was popular between the 1920s and 1950s. The enthusiastic collector of anonymous photography Jochen Raiß (1969–2022) discovered these motifs on flea market excursions, and has assembled them together in this publication for readers to peruse. Following Raiß’s wildly popular Women in Trees (2016) and More Women in Trees (2017), this volume gathers some of his favorite images from his 25 years of collecting this charming photographic genre.
Whether the women are cheerfully dangling their legs, casually nestling in the branch forks or athletically climbing to the treetop, each picture has its own story to tell. From boxes containing numerous snapshots of other people’s lives, wildly jumbled together, Raiß pulled out black-and-white photographs of women gazing into the camera’s eye from dizzying heights and in surprising poses.
