My inspiration for this project started with my adoration for the forms and textures in nature, and those in trees in particular. Edward Weston’s Peppers and Karl Blossfeldt’s Flowers, made me more attuned to the expressiveness of natural forms and the possibility of framing them in a thoroughly new light. This series is a part of an ongoing project that I have been working on since spring 2017; I have taken the photographs in two forests in Istanbul, Turkey.
A thing can have a soul without possessing a thinking ability. This is the essential idea underlying The Souls of the Woods—ten 60*90 cm environmental portraits of decaying and cut trees photographed in forests. The work introduces trees as characters who have emotions etched into their bark. As the project progressed, I kept coming back to stumps as the most expressive form of these emotions – as if the decayed or cut tree spoke immediately of the vulnerability of living. It was as if the stumps granted me access into the emotional life-world of the trees.
