Women in Trees

Humorous and beautiful

“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 but has not yet been addressed in any book. The enthusiastic collector of anonymous photography Jochen Raiß (1969–2022) discovered these motifs on flea markets.

From boxes containing numerous snapshots of other people’s lives, wildly jumbled together, he pulled out black-and-white photographs of women gazing into the camera’s eye from dizzying heights and in surprising poses. This new edition of the two previous titles brings together gorgeous photos that Jochen Raiß collected over twenty-five years.