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Immersive Landscapes
Growing up beside tidal marshland on the English Channel I was always drawn more to the salt marshes with their low surrounding scrub and wind battered trees and to small dense moorland copses rather than to the big ancient forests of Britain.
And so the northern boreal forest has an echo of familiarity with its low thick dense tangled scrub, the bush, which is messy and unordered. A photographer’s natural inclination is to look for a vantage that will impose some order on this view, but here that is a mistake.
This work seeks to recognize that disorder, spreading the field of fine detail over the whole image like a patina, allowing the eye to wander satisfyingly around the whole frame without ever really finding a point of rest. The use of large format negatives renders this complexity in fine, almost fractal detail.
The trees lack height and substance. There are no massive oaks or giant redwoods to anchor the forest either physically or visually and this northern forest lacks a dark dense forest floor. Instead the harsh oblique summer sunlight angles through and reaches all but its deepest parts giving areas of strong shadow and highlight. The results are “immersive” landscapes where the whole wide visual field is potentially full of interesting subplots against the overall story the picture is telling.
Timothy Atherton