Gerhard Richter: Wald

Gerhard Richter has been taking photographs in the dense forest near his Cologne home since 2005. This complex artist's book features 285 of these stunning, almost abstract images, sorted loosely into groups--delicate branches, horizontal logs, diagonally growing trees--and interspersed with German text from a forestry magazine, all the words of which have been shuffled by means of a random generator and then edited to remove any overly explicit names or passages--although the resulting absurd text can still be recognized as a commentary on forest issues. Further, Richter divides the text into seven horizontal strips that run through the book, arranged according to strict parameters, which he then undermines so that the 106 variously assigned pages fill continuously with text, and then empty gradually after the only completely filled page in the middle is reached--producing a unique fading in and out of images. In German only.