Green Monster

The Japanese photographer Kenji Ishikawa who was famous for the photo series "Gekko-yoku (Moonlight bathing)" talked very interesting story. It's about his experience staying in the Jungle for photo shooting. According to him, trees surrounded him looked a dreadful monsters when the physical condition was not good. Of course, there was an opposite case. When he was healthy physically or mentally, the nature around him looked so calm and peaceful, he said.

I could understand it very well. Because me myself had similar experience. Basically, an animal had more diverse figure than a human. A plant had much more various, or even strange, figure than an animal. I think it could look like monster sometime. However, whether you feel like "I'm not alone in jungle. 'Cos I'm surrounded by hundreds of lives" or "I'm so scared for being watched by weird trees from darkness" it's depends on personal emotion after all.

I remembered German photographer Karl Blossfeldt's (1865-1932) works. It's a series of still-life photos of small plant placed in front of simple brown cardboard back ground and taken by his home made camera. They were small structures of plant like leaves, stems or buds. The shapes gave me tons of imagination. Some looked like singing woman or steel coil spring, and the others looked like architecture . It's interesting because once I got thinking it looked like something, it wasn't definitely anything else.

It's fun seeing nature around you in full of imagination. Even if it's a road side tree trimmed by gardener, it became looking like something else.
And this is an easy and inexpensive training for brushing up my imagination.