To mark the exhibition at Schloss Benrath in Düsseldorf, Schirmer Mosel presents the book « Simone Nieweg: The Woods, the Trees, the Light », a photographic hymn to the beauty of the forest and its trees. For more than 30 years the Düsseldorf-based photographer Simone Nieweg (born in 1962) has had a keen interest in nature and landscapes. For her new book The Forest, the Trees, the Light, Simone Nieweg roamed through forests in Europe and North America. Her journeys took her from the Lower Rhine to the Swabian Mountains, through northern Norway and the south of France, the Mühlviertel region in Austria, and California. Over the course of 25 years a series of enchanting color photographs emerged, of which 90 are featured for the first time together in a book.
The images by Simone Nieweg, a former protégée of Bernd Becher at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art, are composed with great care, technically perfect, and always devoid of human figures. It is almost possible to sensually experience the diverse colors, smells, and noises of the forests and plants. Regardless of whether they stand alone, in a row or a group, form part of a thicket or forest, Nieweg’s camera highlights the way trees are unique and reveals how definitively trees and forests structure and accentuate landscapes.
Simone Nieweg opens her book with Heinrich Heine’s famous poem Forest Solitude and in doing so strikes precisely the tone between Romanticism and Realism that her poetic photographs also adopt. With their snowy paths, glades shrouded in mist and forest edges in twilight, for all their immediacy Nieweg’s forests are also symbolic places – at times melancholy and romantic, at others mythical and wild. The artful light that plays in the treetops or falls on the leaf-covered ground, and which Simone Nieweg approaches with infinite patience, gives her forest images a peculiar distinct clarity and meditative beauty – a book that invites you to take a deep breath.
BOOK
The Woods, the Trees, the Light
Simone Nieweg
With a poem by Heinrich Heine
and a preface by Lothar Schirmer
Schirmer Mosel
German Edition with English/French language booklet
112 pages, 90 color plates
ISBN 978-3-8296-0750-6
€ 49.80, US $ 59.95, GBP 49.95
http://www.schirmer-mosel.com
