The tree, Old Tjikko, stands in a deserted landscape on a mountainside at a height of 1,000 meters in Dalarna, Sweden, and with its impressive age of 9,500 years is considered to be the oldest tree in the world. Visual artist Nicolai Howalt has photographed this exceptional spruce, in itself about 5 meters tall. A single negative has become the many different photographs in this book: a total number of 96 variations created on approximately 96 different types of aged analogue light-sensitive photo papers, many of which are long past their expiration date. The result is an almost organic diversity of perception and expression; an aesthetic where the premise of each individual photograph, on par with the original motif itself, has become an integral part of the image-creating process.

”This is why these photographs of a single, windswept tree are so archaic: they are revealing a different kind of temporality, which we had forgotten we still inhabit. They remind us of a distant past that we are still stuck in. Like a powerful zoom disregarding any corresponding distancing, leaving us dizzy as we are simultaneously drawn away from and brought closer to what we can see.”

Old Tjikko
Pages: 224
Size: 16,6 x 22,5 cm
Printers: Narayana Press (DK)
Hardcover
Language: English
Graphic design: Rasmus Koch Studio
Publication date: November 2019
ISBN 978-87-998207-5-7

Text by:
Henning Knudsen (b. 1948), associate professor, emeritus mycologist, Natural History Museum of Denmark

Lars Kiel Bertelsen (b. 1965), associate professor in Art History at Aarhus University

Søren Gosvig Olesen (b. 1956), author and associate professor of philosophy at University of Copenhagen