Into the Woods

Off I went with a bunch of kids and a pile of photography gear. We were heading into the woods because I wanted to discover how these children would experience this landscape.

A Spring Adventure

For several days, I worked with a group of 9-to-12-year-old children from a local primary school. It was early spring, sunny but still quite cold, so we kept our winter coats on.

Together, we made our way through the woods in a cheerful little parade. After walking for about 20 minutes, we reached a clearing with picnic tables and benches. This would be our workspace for the days ahead.

Capturing the Invisible

I gave the children lightproof boxes with tiny pinholes, sheets of photo paper, and a challenge:

In lightproof tents, the children enthusiastically developed their photos by inserting their arms inside. The picnic tables became our darkroom, and the magic happened by touch. Underneath the setup, jerry cans and buckets of water were ready to rinse the prints.

A Mythical Forest

These children were not just participating in a workshop. In fact, they were helping me with an assignment to create an art installation for an exhibition in the forest. My work would be displayed in a wooden watchtower surrounded by trees.

With this image-based art installation, I wanted to present the forest as a mythical place and inspire people to look at the landscape with a sense of wonder.

Children have a natural gift for imagination, something many adults lose in the rush of daily life. That’s exactly why I asked them for help. They took their job very seriously, and as a result, their work was breathtaking.

A Dreamlike Vision

The children also wrote some texts, and together with the photos, they had an almost fairytale-like, dreamlike quality. Inspired by the work of the children, I enjoyed taking my own pictures in the forest. Their examples helped me very much because I usually don’t take many photos in wooded areas.

Finding a New Perspective

I often struggle with composition, as my images tend to look cluttered. However, this time, it was different. The photos of the woods seemed to take on a magical quality, thanks to the children’s examples, the soft spring light and my pinhole camera.

Once the images were ready, I printed them on canvas and installed them in the watchtower. Each one was placed to correspond with the view in that direction, taken at the very same spot people were looking at.

Nature Through the Eyes of Children

On the back of each photo, I placed texts based on the children’s descriptions of their forest experience. As visitors climbed the tower, they read these texts and were invited to look at the landscape differently, through the eyes of children, and to rediscover their own imagination.

For the first time, I made high-quality prints of these images. They are now available in my webshop. I hope they still evoke the same sense of wonder when they hang on someone’s wall.

Learn more about this project here.

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