Nora Schwarz‘s project Songs of the Taiga is part of the group exhibition Metamorphosis. States of Change at the Goethe-Institute in Paris. The exhibition opened November 13, 2025 during Paris Photo Fair and will run till January 12, 2026.
Nora Schwarz started Songs of the Taiga as her final Diploma Project during Photo 2 at DMJX in the fall 2024. After her graduation from DMJX, Nora returned to her home university, Hochschule Hannover, where she continued to work on the project for her final exam there.
Nora describes her project like this:
“In Sweden and across Northern Europe, a silent yet profound disappearance of the last primeval and natural forests of Europe is underway. These largely untouched continuity forests form part of the boreal taiga belt – the lung of the North – and are vital for biodiversity, climate regulation, and the lifeways of the Indigenous Sámi.
Since the mid-20th century, industrial forestry has relied on large-scale clear-cutting, transforming rich, diverse ecosystems into fragile monocultures. This has led to habitat loss, declining biodiversity, and major carbon emissions — making Sweden’s forestry sector the country’s largest source of greenhouse gases and surpassing even the Amazon in deforestation rates.
With Songs of the Taiga, I make the transformation of these forests visible, portraying people in dialogue with the land – researchers, activists, Sámi, and individuals whose culture and livelihoods depend on intact forests – who are working to protect and restore biodiversity. The project invites viewers to enter into dialogue with these landscapes, to question their own ideas of what a forest is, and to explore a relationship grounded not in the notion of nature as a mere resource, but in reciprocity and interconnectedness”.
The group exhibition Metamorphosis – States of Change show work from eleven students from the Visual Journalism and Documentary Photography program at Hochschule Hannover. The exhibition is part of the series “La jeune photographie allemande”, a collaboration between the Goethe-Institute Paris and the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation, held annually on the occasion of Paris Photo.
