Wald

The forest is the setting for myths and fairy tales and has been a favorite subject in art and literature from time immemorial. Over a period of three years, Michael Lange (*1953 in Heidelberg) wandered through Germany’s vast deciduous and coniferous forests, taking pictures with a sure sense of the places where childhood memories and sober documentations of nature blur. The mysterious photographs were taken off the beaten path, in the thickets and underbrush, at dusk or twilight. What was decisive for the cycle was the question of how the nature of stillness can be depicted in an image. The finest of nuances, shadows, and color gradients create thickly atmospheric compositions of concentrated clarity, conveying an experience characterized by the German Romantic word Waldeinsamkeit (woodland solitude). This publication traces the artist’s photographic tracks.