Olaf Otto Becker – Reading the Landscape

In the first, breathtakingly beautiful photographs of his Habitat series, Olaf Otto Becker (* 1959) presents us with idyllic dreamlike places, paradisiacal tableaus from the jungles of Malaysia and Indonesia. Roman­tic floodplains, tree trunks slung with liana vines, eco­logical niches for countless life forms—these are the kinds of untouched tropical rainforests that we pic­ture in our dreams. Even the temperate rainforest of Redwood National Parks in California seems reassur­ingly intact. The mammoth trees are surviving thanks to rigorous conservation measures.

In contrast, in the second half of his series Becker painfully shows us what happens throughout the globe when interna­tionally operating companies clear large tracts of land and giant areas of barren, treeless terrain result. Erosion also does its work, and no life can survive in these places. In the final section Becker presents the artificial “forests” conceived by various international architects to insert greenery into urban space. Is this our vision of the future?