The Garden of Wonders

Irene Kung, 9 Photographers for the Planet (ITA version)

“Tree: the slow explosion of a seed.” Bruno Munari

I think the artist should offer the spectator what the spectator does not already have. Therefore the task of the contemporary artist is to make people dream with the aid of a positive and intimate message. Dreams enable us to reach great goals and help us in our difficult moments. In my vision they allow us to access intuition, a very powerful emotion that eliminates rationality. I believe that through dreams we can reach the essence of the object in a more successful way.
I wanted to pass on a positive image in this moment of crisis and hardship, and with fruit trees – symbols of productivity, health, fertility – it was almost a natural outcome. Thinking of this project I came across two major difficulties: I hat little time, because these trees only have a specific moment in which they are perfect; moreover I had to find the tree that was not part of an orchard, because in that context trees are laid out on regular grids, hence not in the right position for the image I wanted.
In my way of working it is possible to reinstate the tree to what I felt. That is exactly what I do with my work: I remove everything unessential in order to show the tree as it is, as I feel it. It is intuition, it is irrational: rationality can be misleading, sentiment cannot. Good photography, to me, is the one that moves us.