Much of my history as a landscape photographer has been about the landscape and its relationship with some physical evidence of human activity and settlement. All in the pursuit of ‘defining’ the idea of landscape in a specific time and point of view. Recently, on a trip to northern California, I found myself taking a jaunt, with camera, through the giant redwood forests near Gasquet. Other than the trail I was walking on, there was really none of the evidence of human settlement that I often look for in order to define my picture. And even if there was, the incredible scale of this forest was beyond anything I had seen before. I was at a loss. So I was forced to think differently about my place within this environment. I realized: I was not really ‘outside’… I was ‘inside’ of something. The environment I was inside of, was not an exterior landscape as I thought; it was an interior and needed to be thought about as such. A Forest Interior. The longer I stared at the seemingly random array of trunks, branches, leaves and fragments of sky and light, the more the order of it all revealed itself and the more I knew just where to position the frame. Part 2 of this Forest Interior post, will focus on the very different forests of my home in Northern New Mexico.
Environments: Forest Interiors, pt.1
