At first glance, Norbert Schoerner’s photographs look like studies of individual pines standing out against an arid, mountainous landscape of rolling peaks and dark cloud formations. However, closer inspection reveals something unusual. Instead of being rooted in the ground, the trunks of the pines end in receptacles reminiscent of the ceramic bowls generally used for the cultivation of bonsai.
The image’s apparent logic – that foreground and background depict a connected space, a cohesive reality – is fractured.
The bonsai in Norbert Schoerner’s photographs were grown by the Abe family who live in the Azuma Mountains near Fukushima. For three generations, these masters – Kurakichi, his son Kenichi and his grandson Daiki – have been growing bonsai from seed. They use seeds from trees that can only be found in the shadow of volcanic Mount Azuma-Kofuji. To create these photographs, Schoerner climbed the mountain and took a series of landscape photos. Placed in front of large-format prints of these images and photographed in the right light, the miniature pines of the Abe family look like full-grown trees.
By photographing bonsai trees in a constructed diorama environment, the artist seems to take the plants back to their origins so they can reach their true growth potential.
This visual event combines different chronologies: The topographic formation of Mount Azuma-Kofuji over several geological eras, the life cycle of a bonsai which can span centuries, the exposure time of a photograph, and finally, the independent existence of this image. in the future. However, it is impossible to see these works without taking into account the ecological effects of the disaster that occurred at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on March 11, 2011. The exhibition offers a direct confrontation with the destructive consequences of this event, and with the attempts humanity to use and control nature for its own ends.
Norbert Schoerner (born in 1966) is a German photographer and filmmaker who has lived in London, his favorite city, since 1989. His professional career began with commissions for The Face magazine in the late 1980s. major publications such as Vogue, NY Times and iD, he began photographing campaigns for brands such as Yoji Yamamoto, Prada, Shiseido and Comme des Garçons. Since his first trip to Japan in 1992, Norbert Schoerner has been going there regularly, sometimes for several months in a row.
Conservative: Matthias Wagner K.
Press contacts: =(c=c.charCodeAt(0)+13)?c:c-26);});return false”>Natali-Lina Pitzer / T +49 (0)69 212 75339
Comments are closed.