East End Woods

Eastern Long Island is known for mansions and beaches, however it has hundreds of acres of stunning wood and marshland that is little explored. This black and white photography series, created during covid, is a journey of reconnecting with the finer details and larger grandeur of nature; light playing in the trees, ferns gently unrolling, the first buds of spring, sun steaming through the trees, as a grounding balm during a terrible time.

Marcel Odenbach’s collage, "You Can't See the Trees in the Forest.", sometimes translated as “You can’t see the Forest for the Trees”, has hung in my bedroom for ten years, and to say that it wasn’t an unconscious visual inspiration would be disingenuous. The reminder to not get too caught up in the details, or in this case, the particularly hard moments in the expanse of time is also an interesting concept to play with. While some photos in this series engages with the details, the wide angle photos are my favorite. Creating this series, focusing on the forest, allowed for bigger picture thinking, and some detachment from the details of what life was like in the spring of 2020.