Clearcut

This project is a fourteen-month study of a New Brunswick forest’s response to being clear-cut. I began in June 2005, about one month after the cutting took place, and at first thought to make the photographs as an angry commentary. Almost immediately, however, I became more interested in documenting how the forest was recovering. I became drawn to the different forms of scar tissue that were forming in the wake of skidders, harvesters, and trucks. New, vertical shoots came up out of bent trees, squirrels littered fresh stumps with piles of chewed pine cones, and skidder tracks filled with water to become small streams.

With the exception of the wreck of a 1964 Rambler Ambassador, the clearcut is a purely natural landscape. At the same time, it is a purely a man-made landscape—an industrial by-product, left by machines. I became interested in this paradox—that the landscape could be both entirely natural and entirely human.

A clearcut is a landscape of pure chaos which often doesn’t get a second look. If it does, the vantage is usually from a plane or from afar, depicting the utter devastation of the logging. I was interested to see what this landscape would look like if I photographed it slowly and objectively and closely. By interpreting the chaos of the clearcut with the very formal medium of the black and white contact print, I sought some kind of order in the disorder. I wanted to see where the two would meet, and what would emerge.