Containing 97 unique images made from the same photographic negative, Danish visual artist Nicolai Howalt has created a mesmerising artist’s book 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– visual artist Nicolai Howalt has created a book, where the unpredictability of the long expired photographic papers has become an integral and dynamic part of each image.

The result is an almost organic diversity of perception and expression: 97 different variations of the same motif ranging from gloomy black to ethereal white. Images where the uncontrollable silver halides in the papers create sudden appearances of meteor showers or landscapes seemingly shrouded in dense fog.Questioning the constancy of the photographic image and pointing to the subtle and often overlooked effects of its materiality on our perception, it is as if these imperfections of ageing in the papers reveal glimpses of a distant and different time. Dormant traces brought forth into the present by Howalt and the frozen millisecond of a recently captured photographic negative depicting a tree, which in itself stands as a living image of an almost incomprehensible timeline – the passing of millennia.

“The motivation for the book stems from a personal and long-standing fascination with trees. Trees are interesting . because they, on the one hand, are so closely related to the terrestrial and natural, but on the other are also mythical: Asymbol of life, a mythological power, a tangible image of eternity. To me, Old Tjikko almost becomes a sort of archetype of this duality because of its high age.

A tree cannot be anything but a tree. It takes root and extends its branches potentially over millennia towards the sun.The trees don't care about us, and yet they mean so much to us. Not just in relation to the climatic cycle of the earth,but also on a completely personal level. They become our acquaintances. They grow with us throughout life and through generations. In a way, they can be considered an anchor point of time, a physical container for memories and shared history. In this way you could also say that the tree has a connection to the photographic image, which also preserve time for us and for posterity. Furthermore, the same tree never looks exactly the same. Circumstances change:Light and wind are changeable, the foliage may be more or less dense and branches may have fallen off. In reality our realization of a tree thus consists of an infinite number of visual variations of the same tree, which are influenced by when and how it is seen and by whom.

It's the same with the photograph and the pictures in the book. By repeating the same image in so many variations, I would like in a poetic way to point to the fact that our perception of images is also influenced by time and materiality. A picture of a tree can completely change character from looking like a gloomy and dark night picture to appearing like as nowy landscape in delicate white and foggy tones – even if it is still the same image. I found it interesting that these variations were formed in the material itself. That they were created through something that was beyond my control,because I think it in a very direct way points to something fundamental about pictures: That images themselves and the conditions for our perception of them are not completely controllable. Finally, I think there was something interesting in the encounter between the frozen split second of a single photographic negative, the different ages and expiry dates of the papers, the life of Old Tjikko - stretching over millennia - and the somewhat slow temporality created by the repetitiveness in the book. "

Mycologist Henning Knudsen, philosopher Søren Gosvig Olesen and art historian Lars Kiel Bertelsen contributes to the publication with three essays placing the work in the context of natural sciences and biology, the philosophy of perception and the history of photography.

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Old Tjikko

Artist: Nicolai Howalt
Pages: 224, of which 97 with illustrations
Size: 16,6*22,5 cm
Printers: Narayana Press (DK)
Hardcover. Silver gilded edges
Language: English
Essay by: Henning Knudsen (b. 1948) Associate Professor Emeritus of Mycology, Natural History Museum ofDenmark; Søren Gosvig Olesen (b. 1956) Associate Professor in Philosophy, University of Copenhagen, Denmark; Lars Kiel Bertelsen (b. 1965) Associate Professor in Art History, Aarhus University, Denmark
Graphic design: Rasmus Koch Studio
Publisher: Fabrikbooks
Publication date: November 2019

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Fabrik Books