German Business Plants

The daily work routine of post-industrial society reveals an inexhaustible supply of stories and images; whether as sitcoms, as critical editorials or as government office statistics, sources from which we should learn about the socio-political and economic conditions of today’s working people. But what we all too often forget is that humans are not the only entities in the functioning office. Cacti, dracaena trees, and scheffleras populate medical practices, law firms, and job agencies, in order to bring a little life between the stacks of files and the computer screens. In his photo series Business Plants, Frederik Busch shows us portraits of such plants in their operative states. Portraits taken over eight years, which discover office-botany with personal names and brief characterizations and in which we quickly realize that these plants are indeed »also only human beings«, their tragicomic existence interwoven in everyday questions about relationships, music, and fitness. The humoristic approach that Busch has chosen allows us however to confront these plants as individuals, simply as fellow creatures and not just merely things that submit to the civilizational superiority of the human species.