“Adam had seen all the blessings of Paradise, yet nothing pleased him more than the wheat tree. So he asked God: ‘O Lord, grant me this tree, that it may be mine alone.’ And He said: ‘I grant it.’”
— Abu Ishaq Nishapuri, Qisas al-Anbiya (Stories of the Prophets)
In this Persian tradition, the forbidden tree is a wheat tree.
There are no people in this series. Yet their absence does not mean they have disappeared. Absence can sometimes say what presence cannot.
Everything we know of the world reaches us through human perception. Even a creature no one has ever seen is named, classified and given a place in the human mind.
The objects in these photographs were made to be beside us and to serve us. Left behind, they now portray our presence, perhaps as they choose, and not as we were. Among these objects, we build a story of the human being, a story that may have begun long before us.
The people in this story had already eaten the wheat before it began.
The Forbidden Tree 1 The Forbidden Tree 2 The Forbidden Tree 3 The Forbidden Tree 4 The Forbidden Tree 5 The Forbidden Tree 6 The Forbidden Tree 7 The Forbidden Tree 8 The Forbidden Tree 9
Archival prints of this series are available.
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