For years I have been looking for a way to represent trees. Trees, which are usually only defined by a mere biological classifier. Trees, which are the most obvious part of the space surrounding us that we take for granted. However I still feel that there is much more to trees.
When attempting to describe that feeling, I discovered that there are no words for it. ere simply arn’t and that’s it. us I have been trying to say it with a camera for years now. Giving my thoughts freedom and hoping that my eyes and hands can do more with a camera than the rigid lexicology we have been taught.
I am not a tree hugger, an esoteric or particularly religious, but when I’m standing in the forest, I always get this unde nable feeling and desire to describe it. I have been aided a lot by the writings of Herman Hesse and Valdur Mikita, or perhaps not the texts themselves but the authors’ desire to describe a feeling that cannot be described.
Old, wind worn grey planks of wood have caught my eye as far as I can remember, I have always admired old houses and shing sheds with great love. Even though the tree which has become a structure, has been dead for hundreds of years, I see a story in the cracked and patterned plank that has lasted for more than a generation.
I have also used such wood in my work – in the first hundred years the tree matured, the next hundred years it spent as a part of a wall and now that the building has decayed and nature has taken over again, I picked up the old wood and gave it a role in my own story.
In order to stress what is important and to remove as much of the natural environment from the picture as possible, I have chosen the classical black and white medium. e pictures have a lot of texture and patterned dynamics accompanied with several double exposures.
“Treescape” consists of 15 pictures of varied format which are available in numbered original editions. In addition to those, facemount acrylic miniatures of the works are also available.
Kaupo Kikkas (b. 1983) is an Estonian music and fine art photographer. He received formal training in photography at Finland’s Visual Arts Institute, but he attributes his award-winning classical music portraits to his education in that field (clarinet, sax, and voice).
He has concentrated on fine art photography for twelve years. Although based in Northern Europe, he frequently works in London, Berlin and in the US, as well annual projects in the Amazon rainforest.
His personal projects include a study of graveyards, a portrait series of shale miners, and images of a lost cinema in the Egyptian desert, which received wide exposure in the international media.
He has photographed a number of book- and classical music album covers, and his work often appears in magazines. He was named best commercial portrait photographer at the WPPI Las Vegas 16x20 print competition in 2013, and was honored as the best Estonian portrait photographer in 2011 (Baltic's Photography Festival)
When not working he can be found camping (and photographing) in Lapland. He occasionally still picks up a saxophone and, after a few drinks, has been known to sing.
