It’s a small, delicate book wrapped in cardboard with a torn-paper label, a stretchy cord holding it closed tight. This diminutive form, fraught with care like a secret diary, is essential to the emotional content held within. VERGISZMEINNICHT, forget-me-not, is the second book published by German photographer Thekla Ehling. The photos are interspersed with handwritten entries, stories or ponderings. The guileless naïveté of the writings is compounded by the images, which are similarly simple and honest. Flipping through the small book with the even smaller images means that you need to lean into it, and the effect is complete: it’s an immersive experience of the beauty of one person’s world. There are portraits, birds sitting motionless in a tree at dusk, the last berry on the barren winter branches next to a photo of an aging woman naked and smoking, the capture of the moment when an insect lands on your fingertips. It is, in many ways, a very personal diary, but the poignancy of this tiny treehouse treasure is inescapable: it’s a little book of wonders.

VERGISZMEINNICHT is available as a limited edition of 500 copies, available for sale from publisher Kehrer.

Reviewed by Katherine Oktober Matthews.