Here is a thoughtful, austere documentary by Sönje Storm that largely avoids the irony-potential hinted at in the title. It is about her great-grandfather, Jürgen Mahrt: a remarkable, self-taught naturalist and photographer from Elsdorf in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, who sold off some of the family farm that he inherited to pursue his great passion for the natural world.
Mahrt’s work was interrupted by war service from 1914 to 1918, but he continued until his death in 1940, amassing a gigantic archive of beautiful photographs which he colourised himself with fine brushes; it gives a colossal account of what we would now call the biodiversity of the Elsdorf forest and the surrounding lakes, fields and moorland, especially the numberless lost species of butterfly. Mahrt would sometimes eccentrically position stuffed dead birds in a natural setting for his photographs. He was less interested in human subjects, although towards the end of his life he took candid, posed shots of Elsdorf townspeople.
