Klaus Merkel

Trees like Stones

For over thirty years Klaus Merkel has been photographing stones, rocky landscapes, and trees that he pairs up in double pictures. He portrays the astounding harmony between the animate and the inanimate, between natural and designed manifestations. His previous publication Album of Stones featured Milan Cathedral’s forest of figures and pinnacles next to the sandstone columns of Utah’s Bryce Canyon. In the same way, Trees like Stones presents fascinating connections between natural forms and artwork, such as the millennia-old bristlecone pines in Nevada’s Great Basin National Park and the decaying stupa temples of Burma. The book thus invites the reader to examine and compare the manifold similarities of diverse structures, whether between a petrified wandering dune and a gaping trunk of an olive tree in Agrigento, Italy, or between a mushroom rock in the Libyan desert and a Namibian quiver tree.

For over thirty years Klaus Merkel has been photographing stones, rocky landscapes, and trees that he pairs up in double pictures. He portrays the astounding harmony between the animate and the inanimate, between natural and designed manifestations. His previous publication Album of Stones featured Milan Cathedral’s forest of figures and pinnacles next to the sandstone columns of Utah’s Bryce Canyon. In the same way, Trees like Stones presents fascinating connections between natural forms and artwork, such as the millennia-old bristlecone pines in Nevada’s Great Basin National Park and the decaying stupa temples of Burma. The book thus invites the reader to examine and compare the manifold similarities of diverse structures, whether between a petrified wandering dune and a gaping trunk of an olive tree in Agrigento, Italy, or between a mushroom rock in the Libyan desert and a Namibian quiver tree.

Part of the Trilogy of Stone and Time

English edition – also available in German

Author(s): Klaus Merkel

Design: Integral Lars Müller

24 x 30, 9 ½ x 11 ¾ in

120 pages, 94 illustrations

hardback

2012, 978-3-03778-272-9, English
CHF 30.00

Klaus Merkel

Klaus Merkel (*1940) is a German photographer and author. He studied art history and archaeology at the University of Munich and painting at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Berlin before devoting himself entirely to his passion: photographing stones. Merkel traveled the world for his photographs of rock formations, cemeteries, places of worship, old tree trunks and landscapes that look as if they have been petrified. His main artistic work is represented in the illustrated books "Reading Time in the Text of Nature" (1997), "Album of Stones" (2005) and "Trees like Stones" (2013), which are also available as a signed, limited "Trilogy of Stone and Time" edition (Lars Müller Publishers, 2013).