For 25 years, Hamburg-based collector Jochen Raiß scoured flea markets for historical amateur photographs. After finding a photo of a woman smiling in a tree, he started to notice this was a recurrent theme, especially popular between the 1920s and 1950s. Over the years he accumulated 91 such photos, now collected into a book, Women in Trees. “A number of the photographers have created images that possess a remarkable depth and beauty,” he wrote in the book’s introduction. “The women exert a great effort to hold on to these trees without losing their balance. Their Sunday dresses and fashionable shoes stand in stark contrast to the nature around them.”
