ANDERSON WRANGLE

The photographs in the Forest series were photographed over three winters along the Blue Ridge Escarpment in Pickens and Oconee Counties in South Carolina and Jackson and Transylvania Counties in North Carolina.  I have lived and worked in this region since 1998, and these photographs originated as a way to capture my experience hiking, fishing, climbing, photographing, and generally exploring here.  It is hard to find an unobstructed grand view in these Eastern forestexcept on cliff edges, and I wanted to make photographs which were true to the sense of being deep in the forest.   I wanted to capture the density, complexity and beauty unique to these mountains.  In the spring and summer the foliage is so dense one cannot see through or out of the wood.  The trails at these times of year are often described as green tunnels.  I wanted to work in the winter, when you can see through the forest, in a way that is almost like an x-ray.  I used large format 4x5 film to amplifydetail, line quality, and intense delineated form.  One aspect of my formal strategy was to create photographs which do not have isolated subjects. The subject is all over, even and unified.  Attention is distributed across the image and held in suspension, reflecting the experience of vision, attention,  and understanding of the place. These are intensely personal images for me, and I hope they can speak to you, and offer an image which can last, and unfold in different ways over the years.

- Anderson Wrangle