Gino Bühler

Photosynthese – Urformen des Lebens

07.12.2025 – 29.03.2026

Gino Bühler explores our human way of looking at plants. In his photographic series Photosynthesis, he examines plants that inhabit the urban environment and its surroundings alongside us, making them visible to us. These are “green portraits” that ask about the essential nature of plants. What, then, is a plant? And why do we so rarely notice them?

These questions are answered not botanically but photographically. Plants are first and foremost living beings that live both by and towards the light and carry out photosynthesis. Yet the camera, too, requires light. At this point of intersection—an elective affinity between photography and photosynthesis—Bühler’s images depict plants from his Düsseldorf surroundings. They grow along roadsides, in parks, courtyards and front gardens, at the edges of woodland and in the botanical garden.

Bühler positions his camera on what he calls the “axis of light” extending from the plants. Because their leaves orient themselves towards daylight, the camera follows this perspective of light in order to capture the plant’s “countenance”. Although plants turn the greatest possible surface area towards the light, their leaves are not all positioned in the same way. The portrayed plants consequently reveal themselves as individuals and as organic habitats. Each individual “plant portrait” emerges as a translation of living matter into the form of an image.

Dr Martin Bartelmus