Bond with Nature

On my way to the shoot, I knew the frames had to be tight. I wanted to focus on details captured in nature rather than showing the whole figure or the surroundings. In my imagination, however, small flowers kept appearing—flowers that would draw some of the attention, while the hands would become a kind of living vase for them.

All the way there, I watched the roadside flowers and was more or less constantly considering which of them would work best in the photographs. When we arrived at the forest, reality quickly revised that plan. Although the forest is almost a second home to me, this time it managed to surprise me. There were no flowers. There were not even the characteristic patches of moss I had been counting on a little.

We hung up the hammock, set up our small base, and I went looking for a tree. I needed something not too thick, relatively straight, and preferably covered in something that could become an element of the composition in its own right. The one resource the forest certainly had in abundance was ivy.

So I chose a tree heavily covered in ivy, although at first I had the impression that it would be difficult to find anything truly interesting in the immediate area. We began with the first frames. They were adequate. I even thought the shoot would go quickly, allowing us to take considerably more shots.

But when I started looking at the photographs on the camera screen, I realised that something was missing. The tree and the person still remained two separate things.

So I began weaving the ivy between the hands and fingers. Suddenly, a connection appeared. The plant stopped being merely a background and began to extend from the tree onto the body. When the effect was close to what I had been looking for, I noticed one more thing: if the ivy wrapped around the trunk and the hands, the ropes should behave in a similar way.

That was when everything began to fall into place. The vines and ropes formed similar lines, crossed each other, tightened around the forms and led the eye through the photograph. What had initially been only a substitute for the missing flowers became the true subject of the image.

The next frame was meant to sit somewhere on the boundary of covered nudity. I did not want to build it solely on suggestion or hide everything behind an extremely shallow depth of field. We looked for a calm, harmonious position in which the body would not compete with the tree, but would become part of the same composition.

In the end, it was precisely the absence of what I had been looking for at the beginning that determined the character of the entire series. Instead of flowers, there was ivy. Instead of decoration, a recurring rhythm of vines and ropes. And the hands, which were meant to be merely a “vase”, became the point where human and nature begin to intertwine.