Category: Changing Forests

Charles Xelot

Dead Tree #1 (2020) & Dead Valley (2020)

For several years Charles Xelot has been interested in and has analysed the notion of limits and borders. His practice is full of curiosity and leads him to explore social and environmental changes. Following a scientific training, he began his photographic practice as a self-taught photographer, and is passionate about art book design collaborating with several foundations including Neva in Geneva and Timchenko in Moscow. His work is regularly exhibited and published in magazines such as The British Journal of Photography, Greenpeace magazine and Le Figaro magazine.

With his new collection Ashes, Xelot photographs landscape and forest destroyed by fire. By using artificial light he seeks to remind us that fire is a side effect of human activity and therefore those landscapes are not totally natural. As the climate changes, fires are becoming more frequent; an indirect result of human activity. This photograph was taken two years after a forest fire, only a few shrubs grew back. The trunk of the dead tree is still there, intact and grey as ash.

Doug Fogelson

Anthem No.12 (Chemical Alterations) (2019)

Chicago-based photographer Doug Fogelson visits biologically diverse regions to make film-based photographs of the landscape and then, back at the studio, uses common industrial chemicals to alter the resulting imagery.  His aim is to reflect the transformative effects that human activity has on our planet directly onto the photographic substrate. The chemicals drain away natural looking colors from the dye coupler in the film emulsion and melt the layers down to their plastic base. Through destruction new things are created. Salt crystals, bubbles, dust and various marks or patterns become fixed into the frame while other representational imagery is lost. This offers the opportunity to consider ephemeral processes such as change or loss as well as concepts of resilience and cyclical patterns. 

Chemical Alterations is an image series to engage with nature while commenting on the impacts of climate change, extinction, and aspects of the photographic medium. 

Anthem No.12 is of some trees that were in a burned area near Santa Barbara/Santa Inez, California.

Işık Kaya

Second Nature (2020)

In her practice, Kaya focuses on traces of economic infrastructures to examine power dynamics in built environments. Through the use of lens-based media, she observes the human effects on the landscape, and by framing subjects exclusively at night, she tries to uncover the uncanny atmospheres and qualities caused by neoliberal urbanization.

With the upsurge of mobile devices, the infrastructural needs of the telecommunication industry have exploded, and since the 1980s, cell towers have started to fill the cityscapes. The scenery changed dramatically when the first antenna was transformed into an artificial pine tree in 1992 by a company called Larson Camouflage; also a company that had worked for Disney.

Yu Qiyong

Wetland in Winter (2020) & Power of Growth (2020)

Yu Qiyong is a member of the China Photographers Association and his works have been listed in the Complete Works of Chinese Photographers and Chinese Photographic Art Yearbook; some of these also featured in the Pingyao International Photography Festival and Lishui International Photography Art Festival.

These images were taken in winter at Dawen River Wetland Park in Gangcheng District, Jinan City, Shandong Province. In the context of climate change, the icy scenery in winter is inspiring and fascinating.

Stephen Davis

Ancient Oaks (2020) & Oak Pollard (2020)

Stephen Davis is a retired ecologist, with a long career working for nature conservation organisations in both the UK and Europe. His interests lie in the dynamic ecological processes of growth, decline and decay exhibited by trees, and the multiple ecological niches that persist during the life (and death) of the tree. These images form part of a documentary series of photographs illustrating the ancient oak trees of Savernake Forest in Wiltshire.

In Ancient Oaks these trees are growing amongst much younger (twentieth century-planted) beech trees and are also characterised by deeply fissured bark, broken limbs, splits, wounds and fractures, rot holes, bare branches, and occasionally completely stag-headed crowns and hollowed out trunks which tell of a grand history. The trees are not tall and straight but instead have relatively short squat trunks (the oldest being over fourteen metres in circumference), and with magnificent spreading crowns, some with multiple ascending branches illustrating the historic practice of pollarding.

What is striking in Oak Pollard is the diameter of the ascending branches which are many times larger than the younger standard oak and beech trees that occur across the forest. These limbs develop their own ecosystem, of plants, ferns and lichens.

This is a dynamically changing forest subject to both short and long term cycles of growth and decay. It supports many rare insects, flies and beetles which are specialists feeding on dead wood. The forest also supports over a hundred species of lichen and more than five hundred species of fungi.

Nick Green

04 Cleared Timber Stand (2020)

Nick Green has pursued photography for over 35 years, specialising in architectural and landscape photo-essays using medium-format and home-made large-format film cameras. His professional background is in the restoration of historic buildings, and town planning.

This photograph shows a recently cleared timber stand, symbolic perhaps of one aspect of the climate crisis, but also of the effects on the landscape of growing trees for purely utilitarian purposes, whether for timber or for bio-fuels. The photograph series was made with a Rolleicord Va on Ilford FP4. Negatives were digitised and corrected for contrast, highlights and shadows.