Nicolai Howalt : Old tjikko

Containing 97 unique images made from the same photographic negative, the artist’s book Old Tjikko by Danish visual artist Nicolai Howalt is like no other. It’s a book about the oldest living organism known to man and a book about the instability of the photographic image and the enigmatic intertwinement of time, reality and perception.
The tree, Old Tjikko, stands in a deserted landscape on a mountainside in Dalarna, Sweden, and is considered to be the oldest tree in the world with its impressive age of 9,600 years. A single photographic negative of this exceptional spruce has become the many different photographs in this book. By exposing the same image onto 97 different types of aged analogue light-sensitive photo papers – some dating back as far as the 1940’s – Nicolai Howalt has in Old Tjikko created a book, where the unpredictability of the long expired photographic papers has become an integral and dynamic part of each image.