Freshly Felled Trees, 2007

Freshly Felled Trees is from Eirik Johnson's series Sawdust Mountain, the culmination of his 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."

Exploring the demise of the region's two most important industries, timber and salmon, a result of 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 Expressionist painters from the Northwest such as Morris Graves and Guy Anderson, Johnson uses a rich color palette to render painterly landscapes and portraits of the inhabitants. 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.

Archival Pigment Print
Paper Size: 16 x 20 inches
Image Size: 14 x 18 inches
Edition of 30 and 5 Artist’s Proofs
Signed and numbered by the artist

Eirik Johnson (b. 1974, Seattle, Washington) is faculty at the University of Washington, a member of the photographic cooperative Cake Collective, and serves as Programs Chair at the Photographic Center Northwest. His first book, Borderlands, was awarded the Santa Fe Prize for Photography in 2005, and his most recent photobook is Barrow Cabins (Ice Fog Press, 2019). Johnson’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, George Eastman House, and Aperture Gallery, and is in the permanent collections of several institutions, including the International Center of Photography, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX. Eirik is represented by Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco and G. Gibson Gallery in Seattle.