YANNICK DEMMERLE

Demmerle creates his images using an 8x10-inch large-format camera, which provides the greatest possible sharpness and depth of focus. He thus attains a maximum degree of realism in his early photographs, such as Sans Titre (2002) and Sans Titre (Gewitter im Wald) (2004), both taken in the Schorfheide nature reserve near Berlin. Yet Demmerle is not interested in documenting reality – nor is he aiming to create a dreamy idyll. As Peter Herbstreuth has remarked, Demmerle doesn’t depict nature as untamed and wild, but as domesticated and governed by the principles of geometry and symmetry. „[There is] no distance, vastness, paths, or any signs of culture, and seldom a horizon. Instead, what rules is regularity, symmetry, rhythmic echelons, rows, or golden sections – the harmony of classical image architecture.“ Thus Demmerle subtly alludes to how our subjugation of nature has shaped the face of the Schorfheide region – a wooded area that was deforested and reforested repeatedly over the centuries and that has only been protected as a nature reserve since 1990.

Similarly, for all their beauty, there is always something unsettling about Demmerle’s landscapes – a sense of disquiet that is conveyed not so much by the tress themselves as by the spaces between them. In Les Nuits Étranges, a series of photographs of nocturnal forests from the year 2004, this sense of unease is even more acute. Eerily illuminated by an invisible light source, individual tree trunks emerge from the black depths like pale, silvery ghosts. The darkness of this menacing forest attains a fantastic, almost “uncanny” quality, alluding to the forest as a metaphor for our repressed subconscious, as it frequently appears in fairy tales, for example.

Yannick Demmerle, studied at the École Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, Strasbourg. After having resided in Germany for a few years, he now lives and works in Tasmania.