Women in Trees

Women in Trees / text by ext by Jochen Raiß, Johanna Adorjan / small 112-page hardback, 5 x 7 inches, published in 2025 by Hatje Cantz / ISBN 9783775758345

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A "best of" edition of the wildly popular project featuring found photography of women in trees

"I don’t understand how you can walk past a tree without being happy," says Fyodor Dostoyevsky in his novel The Idiot. Perhaps this thought may explain the motif of women in trees, which was popular between the 1920s and 1950s. The enthusiastic collector of anonymous photography Jochen Raiß (1969–2022) discovered these motifs on flea market excursions, and has assembled them together in this publication for readers to peruse. Following Raiß’s wildly popular Women in Trees (2016) and More Women in Trees (2017), this volume gathers some of his favorite images from his 25 years of collecting this charming photographic genre.

Whether the women are cheerfully dangling their legs, casually nestling in the branch forks or athletically climbing to the treetop, each picture has its own story to tell. From boxes containing numerous snapshots of other people’s lives, wildly jumbled together, Raiß pulled out black-and-white photographs of women gazing into the camera’s eye from dizzying heights and in surprising poses.