Watching the Forest at Dusk
This set of images arises from a number of personal and aesthetic factors. There’s a cautious distinction to be made in photography, when making images of things one loves, to avoid conflating what stirs the mind and senses with what will be seen in the image itself. I approached this project with this in mind, and hope that the experience of being in these forest spaces, which I love, translates sufficiently in the results.
Trees are undeniably beautiful. As humans, we have been deeply linked to them from the beginning, and I believe that a sense of this continues in all of us. It drifts through centuries in our folklore, The woods shown here - The Hollies in Leeds - is a highly-valued and beautiful respite from urban life, especially for those who live nearby. A glorious, natural green cathedral during the summer months, it withdraws into itself in winter and pauses. It rots and is wrecked by storms. Breaks in the canopy appears, as deciduous trees lose their leaves while the pines and others do not. A thin, grey light spills down into these clearings, illuminating the mud, water and decay of fallen trees and the forest floor.
Aesthetically, this direction of light can lend both a softness and an air of drama to a scene, and is a technique seen throughout art history in depicting the human form. Here we see trees in all their similarity to us - reaching up, twisting as if dancing, fallen, broken, or severed - as the bleakness of winter reveals a beauty beyond that enjoyed in a summer’s walk. These images were made in the hour before sunset, when fewer people are around and the forest feels particularly still. Both of these allow for a quiet, thoughtful approach I took some time over each image, often using a tripod. It is in this sense that I feel that the subject, the method and my own perceptual state have aligned well, and go some way to showing what I felt in these times and spaces.
