Trees like Stones

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Klaus Merkel has been photographing stones, rocky landscapes and trees for over thirty years, which he pairs up in double pictures. He portrays the astounding harmony between the animate and the inanimate, between natural and designed manifestations. His previous Album of Stones had already featured fascinating affinities, placing the forest of figures and pinnacles of Milan Cathedral next to the sandstone columns of Bryce Canyon, among others. Trees as well as Stones also presents exciting connections between natural form and artwork, such as the millenia-old bristlecone pines in Great Basin National Park and the decaying stupa temples in Birma. The book thus invites the reader to examine and compare the multiple similarities of diverse structures, be it between a petrified wandering dune and a gaping log of an olive tree in Agrigent, be it between a mushroom rock in the Libyan desert and a Namibian quiver tree.