Text and Photos: Ina Echternach
„At the entrance to the forest something magical happens, all the switches are flipped, the head switches off and intuition switches on. In the forest, there is only the „now“ for me“
Nature and the forest are both a base and a refuge for me, always new and different. With my Polaroid tryptichons I try to capture this magic of becoming, life and passing. The process of creation is very meditative for me: I memorise the positions of the pictures again and again before I finally capture the three sequences on Polaroid film.
I grew up in Bonn and when i think of my childhood and youth, i spent most of my free time outside in nature. Spring, summer, autumn and winter, no matter what the weather was like, I was drawn outside. As I got older, I kind of lost that connection to nature…. It was only about 20 years ago, before we moved from Bonn to the countryside, that I slowly realised that something was missing. And since I’ve been taking photos with Polaroids, I’ve started to build up a very intense relationship with nature again.
Every excursion into nature changes us a little. Stress and hectic fall away..
At the entrance to the forest something magical happens, all the switches are flipped, the head switches off and intuition switches on. In the forest, there is only the „now“ for me.
Nature reminds us what it means to live, to enjoy, to be in the moment.
The forest helps us to return to a connection with nature that is unfortunately often forgotten in our technocratically organised everyday life. If we let ourselves get involved with nature, it helps us to arrive in the moment and to concentrate on it. Fear and worries fall away from us, in the here and now there is no fear, only the moment.
Ultimately, I hope that my pictures will encourage the viewer to go out into nature and that they will enable a new view of the nature that surrounds us. Perhaps one or the other will encounter the „present moment“ when entering nature and can thus put fear in its place….
Website of Ina Echternach and contact
More about Ina Echternach click here
The Art of Angst 