Capturing the forest – the photography of Eymelt Sehmer

By Paul Scraton:

It was a cold winter day when Eymelt invited us to her studio in Berlin-Weißensee. She had been looking for models, people she could photograph using a technique that dates back to the earliest days of photography. It would take a while, she said, to capture each image. We would – in this era of mobile phones and Instagram, when more photographs are taken in a single year than in the previous century – have to be patient.

The collodion wet plate process requires that a black tin plate be coated, sensitized, exposed and developed in the space of about fifteen minutes. We spent a few happy hours in her studio room, laughing and joking and mainly talking to Eymelt’s legs, because she was usually under a thick blanket of some short, either behind the camera or in her self-made dark room where she prepared the collodion emulsion, coating the plates and then developing them by hand.

‘Did you ever try this outside?’ someone asked, and in those six words, an idea was born.

In early 2017, Eymelt had made a short film based on my book Ghosts on Shore about the Baltic coast, and we had been keen to work together on a project again. The idea of finding a way to take the collodion wet plate technique out of the studio and into the landscape was the starting point for what would become our new book. 

In the Pines is a combination of words and images. It is my novella, a whole-life story told through fragments about a narrator’s relationship to the forest, sharing the pages with Eymelt’s photographs from between the trees. Some of the stories contained within the book gave Eymelt inspiration when she took her mobile darkroom into the forest. Some of the images she returned to inspired new stories in turn. Eymelt’s art both illustrates the text and inspires it, and I know I would have created something different, something lesser, without our collaboration.

To celebrate the launch of the book this autumn I wanted to celebrate Eymelt’s talent and her art. What follows is my short interview with Eymelt, about the photography in our book and what she’s planning next. 

What is it about this technique that is so appealing to you as a photographer?

First, I love analogue photography in general. And then, what I find most intriguing about the collodion wet plate process, are the imperfections of the images. The photos are blurred; the images look liquid, creating blind spots. These are voids to be filled by the viewer’s imagination. And each photograph is truly unique.

When you first showed me the technique in the studio, it seemed almost impossible you could take it outside. What specific challenges did you face when taking your camera out into the forest?

The most challenging thing involves the developing, in that I have to do it immediately. The coated photoplate needs to still be wet for the developing process, which means I have about ten to fifteen minutes from coating the plate until developing it. I have to therefore coat each plate by hand before each photograph. I cannot prepare a batch in advance.

Once the photograph is taken, the plates can only be handled in darkness. So I need a mobile darkroom, and I built one out of a former steamer trunk. Transporting this monster out into the woods, to basically build a lab out there among the trees, was quite a challenge and was time-consuming as well. 

Added to all this, and related to how much time everything takes, is that I am somewhat exposed. To the weather, and especially the temperature, which can have a major impact. During the winter, for example, the chemicals on the plates froze, creating some beautiful crystalline structures on the photographs. It was as if the environment had engrained itself on the image. But that is also what I love about the technique – you have to embrace the uncontrollable and see what happens.

In my introduction, I’ve written about how the photographs both related to the text and sometimes also inspired it. How was it for you, working on a collaborative project like this?

Generally, the inspiration for my works comes from fairy tales and myths, so the starting point is almost always a story. In the Pines was my first ever collaboration of words and photography, and as your language is very evocative, I could picture some of the images in my head right away. What also helped were the walks and talks we had, especially through the landscape. It helped me get a feeling for it.

Text is interesting because it can go into detail, and you take the reader with you. With an image it is slightly different. I am choosing the frame of course, the perspective and the light situation. But there is more there for the viewer to decide for themselves. Not least when it comes to how close or carefully they decide to look.

My favourite aspect of the collaboration was that it basically forced me to take the technique outside and into the woods. Without this project, I’m not sure I would have given it a try. And spending all that time out there with my camera and my mobile darkroom meant I had lots of beautiful encounters with mushroom foragers, kindergarten kids, horses and hikers.

So will you be taking more landscape or outside photographs using this technique in the future?

I’m certainly going to take some more. I would also like to experiment more, try some things with filters etc. 

In the Pines is all about the narrator’s lifelong connection to the forest. What does the forest mean to you?
For me the forest has always been, since early childhood, a kind of retreat – a place of sanctuary. I could lose myself in fairy tales, and in difficult emotional times it was a place where I took refuge. To this day, the forest is still a place of solace for me.

It was also an adventurous playground for myself and my brothers. A place where you could pick berries and hunt mushrooms, where you could climb trees and build secret hiding places far from the parents’ eyes. It was our own microcosmic realm and it captivated our imagination.

Finally, what’s next for Eymelt Sehmer? You have a gallery in Berlin – are there any projects or news from the gallery you’d like to share with us?

Oh, I have lots of ideas! In early 2020 I took the Trans-Siberian Express through Russia to Mongolia where, thanks to the pandemic, I got stuck. Initially I’d intended travelling there to take photographs of the Dukha people, a nomadic reindeer tribe, and then, having got stuck in Ulaanbaatar with my guide and his family, I met his wife Mugi’s motorcycle club – the first and only female motorcycle club in the country: the Mongolian Lady Riders. Modern nomads.

I made a short film about the motorcyclists and have photographs from the entire trip, but it takes thought and care as to how they might be used. My experience with the Dukha, for example. It was a nice experience, but parts still felt awkward, and we as artists or tourists always need to be careful as to how we present, and indeed to an extent, ‘exploit’ such encounters and topics for our own artistic ends. 

I’m also working on a portfolio of analogue photographs of female characters in mythology, and in the gallery we are slowly getting back to exhibitions, readings and film screenings. Thanks to the pandemic, and the ever-changing situation, it is hard to plan things in advance. But in 2022 we hope to host some photography workshops and collaborations with different people from our neighbourhood in Berlin.

Galerie Arnarson & Sehmer, Berlin
In the Pines by Paul Scraton and Eymelt Sehmer, published by Influx Press

Here, Under the Eaves

By Rebecca Smith:

Our house martins are back. They are rebuilding their nest, having already scraped last years’ mud and feathers away. Repairing and strengthening seems like good practise. I watch them as they swoop and tumble with complete control in the strip of sky between the houses. I live on a young street, only five years old. I count at least twenty houses, here from my front window. There is more brick than branch. More road than grass. But, I remind myself, the street is still in its infancy. We have a lot of growing to do.

I have planted a rowan tree and a red acer on the front lawn, a birch, an apple and a pear tree in the back garden. Every day, I study their progress, note the extra space they take up, expanding their green leaves. For so long nothing seemed to happen, but of course it did. Winter can feel like an age. 

There is no chorus in the morning here yet - the trees are too small, their branches too flimsy for the birds to settle on. I remember, last year, hearing the chirps of the newly hatched house martins in their nest under the eaves and how they chimed with the cooing of my own baby girl. The birds are back, the baby ones now fully grown, and my daughter is saying whole words. 

One day the trees will be big and if I stand here and look out of the window, I’ll see green. Not the rust coloured brick of the mirror image house opposite, or my neighbour silhouetted in the window as he walks from room to room. I look at the rowan tree and wonder what is happening beneath. What is it like down there this time of year? Is there a fuss, a rush, a ‘let’s get on with this’ kind of attitude? I hope we have not made it too hard for things to flourish up here. I plant more lavender and sow bean seeds.

The woods that line the edge of the estate are full of creatures. Woodpeckers skip round trunks of trees (my daughter shows her Dad at home, nod nod nodding her head). We find tadpoles that are high and dry, small clumps of them with only the smallest wiggle left in their tails. A robin, who I swear I knew in a previous life, follows our step through the trees. I want them to follow me home, like Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. A trail of birds, insects, mammals hoping and jumping up the curb.

Among the houses, nature knows there are different rules. Maybe the house martins are the pioneers. They are showing the rest that it is possible to make a home here. The trees are growing, I promise. I’ll plant more lavender for the bees and make beds for the snap dragons. I’ll leave a gap in the foot of the fence for the hedgehogs. It’s the least I can do.

***

Rebecca Smith is a writer, podcast maker and teacher based in central Scotland. Find out more on her website.

There are Different Kinds of Sense

By Helen Sanderson:

Putrid mushy apples sink underfoot, orange with decay, and the smell of fermentation has become like strong cheese. We're cutting down trees like old woodsmen. I romanticise what I'm doing like that in order to feel better about it. Turn it into an image from a painting or film or something, you would probably admire the people in it, and then see yourself in a better light. Art gives dignity to the desperate and desolate. Or makes them more palatable. It's really forestry not gardening, this. That's what Derek says defensively and repeatedly, although I don’t know how it defends him or from what. He trudges slower and slower dragging branches along behind him, hood up and head down, shoulders slumped. Branches hit him in the face, his foot catches on the precarious moss-covered fabric of the ground. 

Derek may be confused about why I am there. I haven't been working there for 30 years like he has, I'm not local and have dropped into this sphere from an entirely different one. He could think that shows commitment, or, as I imagine, he could think that I may have the point of view of a tourist, choosing the novelty of this undertaking out of the blue for some unusual image I want to cultivate. I am certain a number of jokes have passed his mind about being alone together in the woods, but he must know he wouldn't enjoy my faked amusement. 

We tread on twigs and moss-covered rocks and it's a relief to be somewhere less manicured than the formal gardens of the same estate where I normally work. It's still not exactly wild though, most things have been planted deliberately. Next to the trees we are coppicing, the landscape is feels almost industrial, which is strange considering it is entirely vegetation – rows and rows of dull unidentifiable crops, presumably to feed livestock. Trees tower in the distance, and where the trunks are thickly covered in ivy, or have strangely shaped stunted branches or lumps, they appear as the forms of giant men, hanging from the tree canopy or standing awkwardly with bent knees. The kind of landscape that makes you think you can see someone or something moving out of the corner of your eye, especially in this dull weather. Like there's a presence in the air, somewhere just out of sight.

“Look, he's having a hard time putting anything on him.” It takes me a while to realise Derek is talking about a tree, and a further few seconds to conclude he was pointing out the tree isn’t growing leaves very well. I have started to find that it is easier to understand him if I listen to the words without attaching them to their meanings - to allow each word, or combination of words, pull waves of feelings and thoughts through me, and without thinking about what they meant, allow them to create dreamlike images floating in my brain like a reflection of the surface of some rippled water. Maybe I am here as some kind of tourist, enjoying colloquialisms, deciding they're very poetic.

We drive back through fields to eat in the mess room. The men, the innocent men, you can tell they're trying not to appear lecherous, avoiding coming within a few feet and moving their hands away quickly from anything near me. I should think of some kind of joke to make so we can all be more comfortable. I have the impression they're muting their own jokes for my benefit, unsure of what is acceptable.

Gardening is more sensual in a lot of ways than other jobs - roughly, physically sensual, pain from scratches and bruises and muscle aches, the smells and sounds of outdoors, birds and wind and machinery, unstifled belches, things coming out of people into the open without a second thought, less hidden. Now the sounds of eating, garbled, unintelligible words caught in throats with the unswallowed food, smells of petrol and grass cuttings, old sweat and stale damp. I imagine judgements of what’s meant to be beautiful or repulsive blur over time when dealing with sludge and decay and strange looking slimy insects alongside ethereal blooms and the freshness of plants. Either that, or perhaps sometimes more of a forced need to separate the sludge and freshness, acceptable and not. Or neither.

The small room we eat in smells of something not quite dirty or bad, but as if something small had rotted there a long time ago, or there had once been a lot of something very unpleasant there which had long ago been removed but left something of itself behind in the air. Grimy baked bean smears and distant, stale, savoury food mixed with moss. It is in the walls. This room, and times like this, could make me wonder what I'm doing here. I can come across as a pretentious snob even to my friends, but I’m just here. I didn't go into whatever was expected, I'm just sitting here in a weird smelling room with my colleagues. But I've got used to wondering what I'm doing anywhere. Might as well be here. There is that sphere of Gardener's World and the Chelsea Flower Show, people with gentle voices who will always make sure they are in beautiful places but uninterested in how enough wealth became accumulated to create them, exclaiming over the beauty of a flower, as toddlers over a new toy, without wanting to know about the colonialism associated with it being here. And then there are people with physical labour experience, hired because they can use machinery and lift things. People who own gardens and people who work in them, or on council owned grass verges or hospital car park gardens. But that's far too simplistic, I know, and some days it feels like something vital but usually unspoken unites all of us. I assume they don't know how my being out of place accentuates the assertion of my own existence, proof of the force of my will to make internal ideas become external reality, to connect the two realms as we must. But maybe they do know. 

On my way home the pavement seems to radiate humidity - that warm damp hard dusty smell after a certain kind of rain on warm day. Redundant seeds are scattered around each tree in the pattern of sparse chest hair. Seeds that will lie dormant until some kind of change in their environment triggers their germination and growth. I now know about the hormones auxin and giberellin and abscisic acid involved in the development of these seeds and their dispersal onto the ground. It's just a mechanism, it's just hormones making the plant do things, do things to attract pollinators and then sense when conditions are right to procreate. There are journeys going on all around me that I was previously unaware of, whole new worlds and systems right there next to me, which have provided relief from the ones I already knew about and lived in. 

I wanted to leave once, go back to the worlds I already knew. But I've grown used to the intentional miscommunications, grown to expect them. So much that I feel affronted by a genuine response, or expectation of one from me. It becomes more obvious that language is a manmade system of signals, not the holder of innate meaning. We build something rooted yet transient. Tucking little bedding plants into the earth, picturing myself as a child tucked between faded cotton sheets in my darkened childhood room. Teasing out the roots of larger shrubs and imagining the underground networks of roots reaching all the way to friends and family back in the city. Sometimes it seems I’ve moved my life closer to nature to find it fully inhabited by man. The inner-city community gardens felt more of an idyllic wilderness, felt more free of human hierarchies.

I’m exhausted in the evening, as every other evening, but for a second I catch the scent of decay on the cool air coming from an open window and feel a shiver of excitement. After the rain it smells like the early nineties again. Still-warm air holds only the sense of a chill, eventually to bring smoke and fog, fire and ice, and the soil will grow still and grey like a face tense and drawn. But for now the damp warmth still holds an excitement about the death of the year. It holds the memory of excitement for something, maybe for the future regardless of what it is, even if that future is death, the memory of looking forward creating a loop connecting my entire life since becoming conscious of the change in the air. It makes me picture daddy longlegs on an old school wall and I wonder why everyone had always seemed to like them but not spiders. Maybe we knew their presence was fleeting. Too bumbling to pose any threat. Spending a lifetime attempting to fly, never quite reaching their goal, learning by banging into the walls they try to follow upwards to the sky.

***

Helen Sanderson studied English Literature at UEA before becoming a Gardener. Originally from Nottingham, she now lives and works in South East London. She is currently working on novels, short stories and a Garden Design PGDip alongside her gardening job.