Summer in December

I hate winter. There’s snowboarding—you get a whole day on white slopes, then collapse in a warm cabin and drink yourself stupid. That part’s fine. But the rest of it, the mud and dark and cold that just sits there, it hollows you out. I spend months wanting time to move faster.

So these photos by Kristijonas Duttke make a kind of sense. He shot them with his model Katharina in a tiny garden shed outside Dresden over the summer, surrounded by plants and flowers jammed into the middle of a garden allotment community. The whole idea was to capture that feeling and bring it back when everything outside turns grey. He called it a small patch of paradise, which is what you hear in promotional material, but looking at them, it’s true.

There’s something Swedish about them, even though it’s Germany. The light feels different. The air looks different. You look at these and your brain actually believes for a second that it’s warm right now. Katharina models on the side but has some other job—Kristijonas wouldn’t say what. It doesn’t matter. She’s just a person in summer light, which is all this really is.

They do what they were supposed to do. In December, sitting under fluorescent lights with the heat blowing, I look and remember what warmth felt like. Not actual warmth. Not going to change anything. But you look anyway.