ATMs & lion dens: What happens to Christmas trees after the holiday season?

Nikita Teryoshin bought his first ever Christmas tree for his home in Berlin two years ago. It was a tall one, standing at about 1.7 metres high, and he didn’t really know what to do with it. “It was the first year that I have wanted to buy a Christmas tree,” he recalls, before pausing. “Because of the midlife crisis, I guess – I just thought, why not? It’s kind of nice, then I realised that you actually need a stand to put it in, and there’s actually a huge industry around these Christmas trees.”

After that year’s festivities, a friend of his, who had recently moved to the German capital from Moscow, came to visit. As the pair stepped outside one day, the friend was struck by the number of evergreen firs lining the streets, turning to Teryoshin and asking: “Why are there Christmas trees everywhere?”

It gave Teryoshin, who has lived in Berlin since 2017, pause. “For me, it was normal, and then I thought: ‘You’re right, it’s actually not that usual,’” he says. “So I started to look out for especially interesting situations and places where they end up.”

Simply walking around Berlin over the course of two Januarys, he soon found Christmas trees in all kinds of strange places, from inside an ATM cash machine to perched on top of road signs, and even in a lion’s pen in a zoo. Photographs that he took of them are now captured in his new photobook O Tannenbaum – Pine Trees of Late Capitalism, which forms an eyebrow-raising, odd view of the festive period’s chapter-closing act: the disposal of a Christmas tree from a home.

The photographs are surreal and absurd, while forming a sharp reality shock to the baubled jubilance of the holiday period. “I like the contrast of first taking a Christmas tree and dressing it up nice and festive – it’s one of the most important rituals during the Christmas period,” Teryoshin says. “Then at the end you throw it out, it ends up somewhere, brown, hanging around next to a railway and dogs are pissing on it.”

O Tannenbaum also features a series of action shots, with the photographer capturing people flinging Christmas trees out of their apartment windows. The very first one that Teryoshin took actually came courtesy of his neighbour, who dropped his tree to ground level from the fourth floor. “It was actually by accident,” he explains. “I didn’t know that people threw Christmas trees out of the window until I saw my neighbour. Then the next year, I posted on Instagram asking if people were going to throw their Christmas trees from their windows, went to their places, and took pictures.”

But as the book’s title suggests, the photographs also wink towards the opulence of Christmas time – a season when purchasing lavish gifts, eating to the point of gluttony and binge drinking are celebrated. “Even though I’ve bought Christmas trees two times, I did get mixed feelings,” Teryoshin says. “Because it actually shows a kind of perversion – it’s a tree, not a toy. You just grow it, then cut it down, and then throw it away after two weeks.

“The project was not meant to be super critical,” he continues. “More funny, but it’s also a bit sad, and tells us a lot about our society somehow.”

O Tannenbaum – The Pine Trees of Late Stage Capitalism by Nikita Teryoshin is published by pupupublishing.

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