Klaus Merkel

As in his previous book The Reading of Time in the Text of Nature, photographer and artist Klaus Merkel continues to search for--and record in striking black-and-white photographs--structures in nature and architecture that, no matter where they are, exhibit overlapping patterns and configurations, significant deviations and parallels, and resonate in juxtaposition. In this book, he has turned his attention to stones, rock landscapes, as well as man made objects, such as temples, ruins and churches. It is a process that he insists takes patience, sometimes years, both in allowing the force of the photograph to make itself felt over time and in seeking the perfect pair, the other photograph that will reverberate with another in tandem. A creative dialogue unfolds. The pairs of pictures grow together completely imperceptibly and naturally.

Klaus Merkel’s coupled photographs mirror the physical and spiritual patterns of both natural and architectural structures. They demonstrate fundamental and universal formal laws in their compelling revelation of inseparably intertwined nature and culture. The pictures are grouped according to such themes as stratification, crystallization, the vegetable world, and inside/outside.