Over four years and seasons, Loredana Nemes has photographed the beech trees that are characteristic of the landscape above the chalk cliffs of the island of Rügen, made famous in art and history. What began as a relaxing walk has turned into an impressive, long-term photographic observation of this “forest seascape.”

The pictures she has produced are of an ancient, archaic landscape that has survived for many generations and will continue to survive over many more in the future. They capture the quiet, the beauty, the robustness, and the fragility of the beeches set against the backdrop of the smooth, timeless horizon above the sea; and the magic of fog, light, clouds, snow, and the seasons of the year. At the same time, however, they also convey a sense of both ephemerality and hazard, because the forests are at the mercy of climate change.

Perhaps the beeches at the Königsstuhl remind Loredana Nemes of the forests in Romania’s Carpathian mountains, where she hiked as a child with her father, and this explains the profound emotion expressed in her photographs? At any rate, the beeches on Rügen are linked to the beeches in the Carpathians, for they are all part of a UNESCO natural world heritage site, the “ancient and primeval beech forests in the Carpathians and other European regions.”

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Born in Sibiu in 1972, her family left communist Romania in 1986 for Aachen, Germany. From 1993 to 1999 Loredana Nemes studied German Philosophy and Mathematics at the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen University before moving to Berlin in 2001 to pursue her career as a photographer.
Since 2006 Nemes has taught photography in numerous universities including the Goethe Institute, Hartford Art University, and Art University Weißensee Berlin.
She is a member of the German Academy of Photography and lives and works in Berlin.