Jens Nommel

May Be an Image of Nature

I am both a geographer and a photographer, and therefore I have a geographical view. My imagery is documentary, and I almost always work in balanced light conditions. If I had to condense my work in three terms these would be symmetry, calmness, and topic. At the same time, I feel a longing for the unpleasant realities that our lives produce. Susan Sontag called it “needing to have reality confirmed”.
One example of my work is dealing with boundaries. As a geographer I see boundaries everywhere. Boundaries tell us something about risks and balance of power. Perhaps my interest stems from the fact that I grew up on the inner-German border. The iron curtain hung right in front of our city. And there I saw, that boundaries can be extremely dense and walls very high.
For the series “Maybe an image of nature” I visited zoological gardens and concentrated on their artificial landscapes. What fascinates me about these places is the illusion of freedom. Architecture is given the task to suggest, that animals are residing in their natural habitat. And so African and Arctic landscapes have emerged side by side. Animals are not seen in the pictures because they would attract all the attention. Maybe zoos best embody what connects my images: the hub ris of man.
I was born in northern Germany. I studied Geography but am now fully concentrating on photography. The center of my life and work is Hamburg. I have been shooting digital medium format for three years. I edit the images gently and try to avoid retouching. Actually, I am waiting for a camera with an endless resolution...

Words by Oskar Piegsa
A man goes to the zoo, but he does not see the animals. What does he see then? This is the initial question of the photo project «May be an image of nature» by Jens Nommel and at the same time the description of his method. On cold, grey days, Nommel moves with his camera through the zoos of major European cities and documents the landscapes in which the animals are presented, but not the animals themselves.
If you close your eyes and think of a zoo, the image of a tiger or lion trotting lazily back and forth in a cell behind iron bars may come to mind. This could be a childhood memory or an imagination: a moral judgment depicted as a visual metaphor of human hubris and guilt (what if one day the bars no longer protect us?). Such cages can still often be seen today in fictitious depictions of animals in captivity, for instance in movies such as «Jurassic World» or in children’s books such as «Good Night, Gorilla». However, from the zoos, as Jens Nommel visited them, they have largely disappeared.
«What fascinates me about these places is the illusion of freedom», he says. As an academically trained geographer, he also sees boundaries where they should not be seen. Because the new cages no longer need iron bars, they are embedded in the landscape, for example through ditches, which are hidden behind small hedges and earth mounds and thus create the illusion that behind them the animals almost live like in the wild. But the disappearance of the bars from the zoos does not make the animals freer, but only the view of the visitors.
Jens Nommel’s photos are not an outraged accusation, but factual, calm and at first glance strangely empty. «I want to lower the pulse of the viewer», he says. Only those who do not immediately recognize what can be seen in a photo begin to look consciously. Thus, one discovers that every simulation contains glitches, including the simulation of freedom in modern zoos. At second glance, one is almost amazed at how bunglingly these artificial landscapes are knocked together: Poorly camouflaged doors lie in rock walls. Tufts of grass proliferate from glaciers. And eyelets can be seen on a block of ice: Are they transport eyelets that have not been removed after assembly? Or is this where the window cleaners abseil into the polar sea?
When Nommel posted one of his photos on Instagram, the image recognition algorithm tagged it like this: «May be an image of nature». Maybe.


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Website: www.mapfactory.de