Purple Magazine
— F/W 2006 issue 6
Air
photography by HEINZ PETER KNES
Olivier Zahm, art director — Peta C. Kisur, stylist
At the edge of civilization the untrammeled wilderness begins. Forests, the planet’s lungs, reach for sky as the trees struggle with each other for light. Civilization integrates forces of nature—atmospheric, tidal, thermal, geologic; some of their members retain respect for this fragile ecosystem and for forests’ dark, looming splendor. Natural landscape, infused by the breath of Earth, has inspired musicians from Ravel to Bob Dylan, artists from Chardin to Robert Smithson, photographers from Ansel Adams to Andreas Gursky, architects like Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry, and even designers who reincorporate nature into style and technology.
And just as air is crucial to the perpetuation of our planet’s ecosystem, so too does it energize our bodies, empower our minds, vitalize our hearts and stir our souls – in short, nothing less than the very breath of life itself.
The original Air design concept—bouncing on air, oxygenating movement—made running comfortable for streets as well as rough terrain. In the decades since the first Air, the concept transformed from bouncing to flying, especially in association with Michael Jordan, who seemed to be able to stop midflight to reconsider his direction and delivery of the basketball. Runners still run, and the shoes evolved for an ever-growing urban environment and street culture. All the while Air has continued to create shoes for a world more conscious of the human effects on natural environment.
We asked German artist-photographer Heinz Peter Knes to go from his studio, to a museum, to the forests of Berlin—from private, public, and cultural spaces out to the peripheries into the land.
