Love loves small things. Love doesn't seek big pathos or emphasis. Love hides in the profane; in the shiny shoes in which one has journeyed or in the perfect fold of a beautiful dress. The really big things often lurk in the smallest of details. "I believe," the American poet Walt Whitman once wrote, "a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars." It is a poetry of dignity and nuance. This is a credo about the interplay of all things and the reverberati…

Humility in the face of nature and its inimitable sublimity: that is the feeling that overcomes Jens Knigge during his wintertime travels along the Arctic Circle. He has recorded his impressions of snow-covered landscapes and the mysterious aurora borealis in mostly small-format platinum-palladium prints. In the end, the contact sheets of the negatives of his analog photographs illustrate the inadequacy of established formal idioms and modes of expression. For it seems to be virtually imposs…

We alone are the insiders of our interior worlds. Within ourselves we feel safe and yet often isolated and sealed off. At the same time, hope is almost always contained therein: evident itself in windows, in the gates of the eyes. Each window is a link, a step between the interior and the exterior. The window functions just as with the lens of a camera - it is the point between the camera obscura and the outside. The point where light breaks through and illuminates another world. A…

The Finest Shades of Gray When a contemporary photographer is interested in such an archaic technique as the platinum-palladium print in our age of digital imagery, he must have a good reason: for Jens Knigge it is likely the rich gray tonal scale which can only be achieved in this process. As Irving Penn before him, Knigge has perfected the entire production process as few others have, starting with releasing the shutter of his large-format camera, to the work he later…

Romanesque masonry, rounded arches and cushion capitals, juxtaposed with concrete cuboids, pillars and walls – at first sight, Jens Knigge’s photography thematises two seemingly completely different examples of architecture. The Cistercian abbey at Le Thoronet was built in Provence between 1160 and 1190, according to the specifications of Bernard de Clairvaux. The unknown master builder used the local limestone to merge the staggered, multi-levelled construction into the surrounding …