For a considerable time Laura Samsom-Rous has been occupying herself with a series on nature. She takes photographs of nature as a souvenir of modern Western man; added to the context of the natural history museum, captured and fed in the zoo, preserved and protected in nature reserves. They are stagings of a culturally formed paradise, a cultural Arcadia in which nature is displayed in a way man would like to see it. The photographs by Samsom-Rous ask us what is real and what not and questions nature and culture. The images appeal to the mythic remains of nature in our minds. Simultaneously, however, they indicate the cultural form in which we encounter nature nowadays. The photographs are extremely rich in contrast, causing the images to have a dramatic and sometimes even threatening quality.