Sylvania by photographer Anna Beeke is a composite “forest-land” of photographs that explores the intersection of nature, imagination, and myth in the American woodlands. Across cultures and centuries, the forest has occupied a unique place in our folklore. Good and evil, chaos and peace, beauty and terror: these oppositions are as fundamental to the forest’s liminal landscape as they are to the human experience. Through images of both real and depicted nature, Sylvania examines the differing characteristics of these woods — from Washington to Vermont to Louisiana — while also seeking the Forest Universal rooted in them all. Sylvania explores the physical presence of the forest in the contemporary world as well as its metaphoric presence in our collective imagination.
Beeke’s journey through the forests that would become the subject of Sylvania began in 2012 when she discovered that she had been conceived in Washington State. Never having travelled to these parts she felt a compulsion to go to the place where she began life with the conviction that she would find something there. She writes, “What I discovered, or re-discovered, was the forest, and within it a more imaginative mindset.”
Like most of us, Beeke grew up on the Brothers Grimm and other fairy tales and myths. The forest, which plays a major role in these stories, is a place of enchantment involving an epic journey or the fulfillment of a quest. The forest also represents the unknown — a dark, scary, dangerous place outside the bounds of society where anything can happen. Beeke was interested in exploring how her childhood perceptions and memories about the mystery, magic and danger of the forest are reflected in the real world today. Armed with her camera, she went on her own quest to seek adventure and the unknown. She writes: “small moments of magic and surprise, delight and fear, and chance encounters with strangers along the way inform my direction.” Her experiences in the forest would become the images in Sylvania.
BOOK
Sylvania
Anna Beeke
Daylights Books
ISBN: 9781942084051
Hardcover, 7 x 10 inches
112 PGS. 60 color
$45.00 US
http://daylightbooks.org
http://www.annabeeke.com
