My pals, the office plants
To Frederik Busch, a German photographer, these plants have no less personality than their human counterparts, writes Rena Silverman
UDO will soon be going to primary school, but Anna can already read. Doreen likes to party, and Irmfried is disoriented. Of course, Udo is a rubber plant (or, ficus elastica); Anna, a heartleaf philodendron; Doreen, a ponytail palm; and Irmfried, a succulent. But to the German photographer Frederik Busch, these plants have no less personality than their human counterparts.
“I have a sensitivity for plants,” he admitted. “I approach them as beings, as living organisms and at the same time as kinetic sculptures. They just move very slowly.”
In late 2008, Busch was doing corporate assignments, a world that could not have been farther from his own background in art photography, when he noticed a row of plants in an office hallway.
“And they looked like sculptures,” he said.
A handful of those office plants are now in German Business Plants, published recently by Kehrer. The book is in German with English translations.
Busch grew up an introverta ed child in small village in Germany’s Black Forest. His mother, a pharmacist by profession, also studied botany.
“I had a dog and a cat, and we had a garden,” he recalled. “Next to the garden, there were just fields. So I was curious as a child and my mother told me all the names of the plants.”
PLANTS FOR COMPANIONS
Everything changed, though, when Busch was 10 years old. His grandmother died, his parents divorced, his sister moved out, and he ended up at a boarding school where he didn’t want to be. He felt alone and homesick.
A pet would have helped, but the school, of course, did not allow pets in the dormitories. Plants, however, were okay.
“That was the only living thing I could have as my own,” Busch said. “So I put them on the windowsill and decided that they are my friends now. Ever since, I’ve always had at least one plant wherever I’ve lived.”
Busch started the project in Rastatt, Germany, then moved on to Hamburg, Berlin and other cities and small towns throughout the country. He approached each office plant the same way, using the same camera with ambient light, and no tripod. Each plant remained in its found environment, much like August Sander’s portraits. The forenames and creative captions came later, and many of them make sense. Ute, a yucca palm, leans helplessly on a window sill, for example, taking p t of his pot with him. He “suffers from daydreaming,” Busch decided.
“If you look at them closely for a longer period of time you can actually see how the body of the plant develops in a way so they get what they really need,” he said.
In most cases, that’s light, which leaves absorb using chlorophyll to synthesise, convert, and store sugars from water and carbon dioxide, producing oxygen as a result. Plants tend to lean toward light and if they’re not continually turned, they will take on anthropomorphic gestures.
“They basically have to or they die,” Busch said. “They can’t walk away, they can’t quit their job. But they have to find a way of getting enough sun, water and nutrition.”