Women in Trees

Product detailed description

 Why did women climb trees? "I don't understand how you can walk past a tree without being happy," says Dostoyevsky in The Idiot. Perhaps that thought explains why, between the 1920s and 1950s, so many women had themselves photographed in trees.

Women in Trees gathers these photographs in one place. They were found by the collector of anonymous photography Jochen Raiß (1969–2022), who regularly combed flea markets. In boxes of snapshots of other people's lives, jumbled together, he looked for black-and-white photographs of women gazing straight into the lens from dizzying heights, often in surprising poses.

Some cheerfully dangle their legs, others lean casually against a branch or climb athletically toward the top. Every picture has its own story, even though we usually know neither the woman's name nor why she climbed the tree. That is exactly what gives the photographs their charm: they are funny, tender and surprisingly free.

This edition follows Raiß's hugely popular books Women in Trees (2016) and More Women in Trees (2017). It offers a selection of the best from twenty-five years of collecting, the images the author himself considered the most striking. The book is bilingual and contains 52 illustrations.

It will delight anyone who loves anonymous and found photography, as well as those looking for a gift that is sure to raise a smile. It rewards browsing page by page as much as reading straight through, and sits as well on a coffee table as on a bookshelf.

Jochen Raiß (1969–2022) was an enthusiastic collector of anonymous photography. He discovered photographs of women in trees at flea markets and over twenty-five years assembled a collection that appeared in the books Women in Trees and More Women in Trees.