Eirik Johnson: Freshly Felled Trees, 2007

Eirik Johnson’s series Sawdust Mountain is the culmination of 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.

Each limited-edition print is hand-packed with great care and ships from New York within 3–5 days.