Loving Earth - PBF01 / Witho Worms
18 November 2016 to 18 January 2017
The work presented is an exposé of the process of my photography that I have made my own while working on the 1 two tree project: a series of photos and prints of production forests in Finland, Sweden, France, and Belgium. Planted for the paper and timber industry, some of these forests look natural, some less depending on the country in which they are found. The photographs were taken with a large-format camera on 12 x 20 inch black and white negatives. It is an imprint of ‘nature’, just as she portrayed herself to my camera lens. Two is the second part of this project, a book with a series of drawings of the negatives that I shot in the summer of 2013. A number of tables in which I have noted the distances from tree to tree and to the camera lens complement these drawings. Although the information in a photo is complete and more detailed, my notes in the field enabled me to show where my attention was focused. Thanks to the small sketches and measurements that I had made of the trees, I was able to pinpoint which trees in the photos had first captured my imagination.
My next step was to make full-size pencil drawings of my negatives. These drawings, which are compiled in this book, were the guiding spirit for the printing of the negatives. In these, I experimented with the use of color and responded to the rhythms of trees, revealing a new reality. Each of the books contains one of the resulting proofs. The discoveries of Henry Fox Talbot and many others led to an extraordinary feeling of optimism. There was, at last, an instrument that could reduce the human influence in producing an image. Now, more than 150 years later, photography can capture ‘nature in a natural way’, but it is also an important medium for modifying ‘nature in a natural way.’ That is the power of persuasion of photography. But it was the tip of the pencil that conducted me through the landscape, noted what caught my attention and helped me to locate this again later.
