There is a forest I have known all my life. Not merely as geography or backdrop, not as metaphor, but as place. A place inhabited not just by trees and the slow weather of seasons, but by memory, echo, family, history. I walk the same paths now as I did as a child, though, as a commercial forest, a crop, stands of trees have been cleared. New vistas are produced. Familiar haunts erased and replaced.
As a young man, I built a house there. Or, more precisely, rebuilt a house. Chalk clunch from a pit beside the village. Roof trusses cut from sturdy oaks. Brick from Knettishall. The split flint I’ve always imagined came from Grime’s Graves. Probably an overly romantic thought.
Here, I could raise a family. Not in retreat from the world, but in gentle resistance to its haste. That house, our lifeboat, still stands among the larch and birch, although the children have grown and left.
There is a particular kind of seeing that only forests teach. To inhabit a forest is to submit to layers of shade, sound, scent, decay, renewal. It demands attention to slowness. As photographers like John Blakemore and Jem Southam have shown, to observe a place over years, to return and re-return, is not repetition but revelation. The forest does not yield itself easily. It requires the kind of looking that becomes being.
I often think of Thomas Joshua Cooper, bracing himself against the edges of the world, camera anchored like a compass point. His photographs seem drawn from the same material the forest rises out of. That deliberate making, the ritual of it, the burden and gift of walking into wildness. Somehow, the most important part of the work, is how completely you commit.
You know that poem by Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening? The line, “The woods are lovely, dark and deep.” That line was an incantation. Not warning, not invitation. Something more complex. The suspension of certainty. As a boy, it reassured me that the darkness held promise and adventure, rather than fear or anxiety. As a man, I understand it now as a question of belonging. The speaker, paused at the threshold between duty and desire, knows the woods, but cannot stay.
That’s my life. An itinerant photographer, always on the road.
And so. The forest is my ground, spiritually, visually, emotionally. But I am always just apart from it. Not outside, not quite inside. I belong to it, but I am not of it. That distance, that vapour between human and forest, is the essential territory of the photographic act. It is what compels us to make pictures. To communicate the longing.
To register a returning.
I have come to believe that forests are a place of memory for the human soul. In them, we remember how to dwell. Not only in space, but in time. As a photographer, my task is not to render the forest visible, but to acknowledge what it has always known. That being seen is not the same as being understood.
Thetford Forest, 02/08/25
