To Capture a Shadow

“Trees are poems that the earth writes upon the sky.”
― Kahlil Gibran

I initiated this body of work in response to personal loss. In silence and solitude, I photographed the trees around me.

My emotions raw, in the studio, I started scratching the negatives and prints with sandpaper, chafing the surface of the negative and the print. The damage I inflicted went beyond temperamental catharsis, ironically, by revealing some parts of the paper as the image is erased, the print is transformed, a balm for my sorrow.

The original images are printed with cyanotype over platinum/palladium. These prints are 8 inches’ square printed on Kozo, a Japanese paper that can withstand my process. After I sand the prints, I scan them and make larger inkjet versions on a textured Japanese paper made from bamboo. The old and new are now merged together, blending the best of both antique and modern photographic methods.

My process from photographing the trees, to the platinum/palladium and cyanotype prints, to defacing, rescanning and printing them as large inkjet prints, reflect the life cycle of trees themselves; their grandeur, their uncertain survival and their inherent beauty.