Simone Nieweg, born in Germany in 1962, lives and works in Düsseldors. She studied photography under Bernd Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1984 to 1990.
Simone Nieweg photographs the gardens, fields, prairies and forests that have held her interest for the past 30 years. This book published by Schirmer/Mosel—the second after Landschaften und Gartenstücke (Landscapes and Gardens) published in 2002—brings together 98 color nature photographs taken in the last decade. This is an intimate moment spent in community and vegetable gardens, orchards, on trails, in forests, and in the middle of fields.
Nieweg is not interested in industrial farming, but in the small-scale working of the land that shows the interaction between man and the nature that surrounds him. She photographed several regions in France and Germany as they changed with the seasons. The reader/viewer passes through the budding spring, the green summer, the gardens in late autumn, and the beauty of snowy winter fields.
The tranquility of Nieweg’s images is striking. They are soft, without shadows or bright light. Also surprising is the sense of familiarity that we feel toward these places. There is a very human element in these images of nature, even though no human appears in them. They are free of people, of narrative, and of the picturesque. They are given wholly to nature, whose freedom we feel even as we know that man has passed through there before, with total respect.
Simone Nieweg, « Natur der Menschen »,
Text by Heinz Liesbrock
168 pages, 98 pictures.
ISBN 978-3-8296-0583-0.
Price : € 49.80, (A) € 51.20; CHF 70.90
