Brothers Grimm Homeland

As a wee lad, Grimms' Fairy Tales scared the crap out of me when told by my mother: beheadings, children abducted by witches, children stolen en masse by a piper and never to be seen again, witches pushed into ovens, fathers giving their children to goblins, wolves eating grandmothers... Told to my brothers and I by our mother in our native Dutch language, we were never told that these were made up, imaginary stories, so at very early ages we grew up believing that the evil and the horror of the fairy tales were very real parts of the world in which we lived. It didn’t help that they were read to us as bedtime stories, just before going to sleep.

I was reminded of this when I came across an article about German landscape photographer Killian Schonberger having taken a series of photographs in Germany which, despite the modern day, capture both the appearance and the mood of the Brothers Grimm tales.

Amazingly Schonberger is colour blind but he believes that has aided him in this project: 

"I think colour blindness (I can’t distinguish green from red, magenta from grey, violet from blue and so on) can be an advantage, especially in forest environments. I don't have to separate singular colours visually and can totally concentrate on the structure for a convincing image composition. Forests are always quite chaotic places -- therefore I think the structures are more important for a pleasant result than the colours."

Here are some of the photographs from the Brothers Grimm Homeland project:

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