Gardens of Event: NatureGraphy
Photography converges the subjectivity of the individual (the photographer behind the camera), embodied conventions of seeing (the camera), and the incomprehensible (the world in front of the camera).
Holm Oak Purpura (Cryptid) – Geert Mul 2024
FineArt-Print on Canson Platine Fibre paper, black floating frame
188cm × 227cm (Including frame)
Dode Den (Cryptid) – Geert Mul 2024
FineArt-Print on Canson Platine Fibre paper, with black floating frame
200cm × 200cm (Including frame)
In the back of my mind lurks the absurd ideal of mapping sublime nature on a one-to-one scale, inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’s story ‘On Exactitude in Science.’
Cherry Beech Herbarium (Cryptid) – Geert Mul 2024
FineArt-Print on Canson Platine Fibre paper.
Black floating frame, 231 cm × 194 cm (Including frame)
In the summer of 2022, on the desolate southern coast of Crete, hidden in the folds of a mountain near Gdochia, I came across an Opuntia ficus-indica unlike any I had ever seen. Its spiny pads shimmered—almost impossibly—in all the colors of the rainbow. According to a legend I later heard in the village below, an Ottoman corsair, stranded in Myrtos in the early 16th century, had captured a Portuguese ship, and among its cargo were seeds from ‘the New World’, scattered from the shore by birds and the wind. Apparently, one of those seeds once took root, and each color of the fruit became an echo of its origin. The reds and yellows recalled sunsets over the Caribbean, while the greens and blues whispered of the rugged mountains of Crete and the skies that now surrounded it.
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Cactus Coloratus (Cryptid) – Geert Mul 2024
FineArt-Print on Canson Platine Fibre paper, black floating frame
150 cm × 200 cm (Including frame)
Garders of Event; NatureGraphy
The creation process of these monumental works begins with scouting locations during walks in nature reserves, both in the Netherlands and abroad. This is an intuitive, sensitive, and sensory process.
Scouting is essential because the equipment I use to make these photographs is heavy, and I often travel on foot deep into forests and mountainous landscapes.
When I return to the location with my photographic equipment—often several days later— ‘taking the photo’ consists of capturing more than 100 images of the subject using a zoom lens and an automated panorama tripod. Photographing a single subject takes several hours.
Later, in my studio, the creative process continues—but now with a computer. I ‘stitch’ these photos together using software, creating an ultra-high-resolution file from which I can, in principle, produce prints over 10 meters in size. The stitching itself is already part of the editing process, because during stitching, I can choose between different methods that lead to radically different visual outcomes.
Subsequently, I process the image into a visual form that does as much justice as possible to the moment I first decided: this is the tree I want to photograph.
During the digital editing process, I aim to carry the image as far as possible into a new reality, while at the same time ensuring it remains believable as a photographic image.
The editing process is intuitive. The digital medium carries within it the promise that digital processes are reversible, because of the ‘undo’ option, but my practice shows that a creative process is singular and unique—even a digital creative process.
My photographic images do not represent ‘the moment’ or the fraction of a second in which the ‘photo’ is taken, but rather the reciprocal relationship between maker, camera/technology, and nature. The photo is a layering and a record of all the moments and ideas that unfolded both during the capture and during the editing and execution—a process that often takes more than a year.
The photographed trees and landscapes are not the subject of the work; they are the motif. Nature in my work is a conceptualized image of ‘the outside world.’
Geert Mul 2024
Requests and inquiries: Galerie Ron Mandos Amsterdam.