Collector Scours Flea Markets for Vintage Photos of Women in Trees
Wandering through a market in Frankfurt years ago, photo collector Jochen Raiss stumbled across a photo of a woman halfway up a tree.
This curious photo sparked a fascination that turned into a much larger project. He began finding similar photos of women in trees, and would eventually release books of his finds titled Women in Trees.
“I’ve been collecting historical amateur photographs for a long time, around 25 years. At the start, the photos were simply more like beautiful bookmarkers for me, certainly not a thematic series by a long shot,” Raiss tells his publisher Hatje Cantz in an interview.
“I knew I wanted to make something more out of them. In early 2014, I came up with the actually very logical idea of scanning the pictures I’d found. Suddenly, I noticed details on the monitor that I hadn’t been able to see with the naked eye. That was a very exciting experience for me.”
On Instagram, Raiss uses the handle @imperfekt.photography, which is apt since it is amateur photos that interest him the most.
“The imperfect, the ‘normal,’ the everyday, the more ‘real’ life is what fascinates me. Pictures of people who have actually lived and are now no longer there,” he told The Huffington Post back in 2016.
He finds many of his photos at a flea market in Hamburg, where estate sales are routinely held. “There’s always a sad component to that, when you see that an entire household is being sold off,” he adds.
But Raiss will go all over to other markets in Germany searching for specific photos. “Some of the dealers already know me by sight, even. I talk to them about how I’m publishing a book now, featuring the pictures I’ve bought from them,” he says.
Raiss says that he doesn’t find as many photos of men in trees as he does of women. He puts that down to the fact that men were more likely to be behind the camera at the dawn of amateur photography. Women, therefore, would pose for the camera.
Women in Trees is available from the Hatje Cantz website.
Image credits: © Estate Jochen Raiss
