Almost every day since the start of the war in Ukraine, Katja Stuke has taken a photo of a tree at a site that has been directly impacted by the conflict. For her, each and every tree is a witness to what has happened. Yet, for all that, she has never been there in person, using online services like Google Street View instead. In this way, she authors pictures that follow the rules of landscape or documentary photography, even though they were created on a computer and were taken remotely, so to speak.
There is a lapse of time between the Street View image, the screenshot, and the present moment, and it is unclear whether the tree is still standing, or whether it still existed when the photo was taken. The trees are pixels, data, digital prints, photographed from a distance using a digital map that stores images that in the meantime have become obsolete.
Katja Stuke is a Düsseldorf-based artist and photographer, whose work interweaves photography, publications, video, and curatorial practice.
The publication is produced in collaboration with IST Publishing in Kyiv.
