photography in all its forms

Freshly Felled Trees is a work from Eirik Johnson's series Sawdust Mountain, the culmination of four years photographing throughout Oregon, Washington and Northern California. Focusing on the tenuous relationship between industries reliant upon natural resources and the communities they support, Johnson, a Seattle native describes these photographs as "a melancholy lover letter of sorts, my own personal ramblings".

In exploring the demise of the regions two most important industries timber and salmon as a result of complex mixture of issues including pressure from environmentalists, politics and corporate restructuring, Johnson documents how these communities are affected economically and the work speaks to how they are forced to adapt and survive in an uncertain future . Influenced by the American Expressionist painters from the Northwest Morris Graves and Guy Anderson, Johnson artistically explores through use of a rich color palette, and renderw painterly landscapes and portraits of its inhabitants with his camera. The pictures speak to the timely issues of today and indeed man’s effect on nature. The photographs are epically beautiful, poetic and personal.

Aperture is pleased to offer to our collectors the chance to acquire the work of this important and noted artist —who surely represents the second generation of photographers working within the new topographic movement as evidenced first by the work of Robert Adams, Stephen Shore and Nicholas Nixon.