The Weight of the Woods

The Weight of the Woods began after an intense period of profound grief. Throughout many trips to a local refuge, solace was to be found in the same characters whom I stumbled upon throughout the literal and figurative seasons of life.

This project began in the quiet after a loss to suicide, when the house grew loud with absence and the only place I could breathe was among the trees. I did not go to the woods to make work. I went because grief needs somewhere to walk. The camera came later, almost by accident, as a way of keeping company with what I was seeing.

The Weight of the Woods is a year-long study of one patch of Great Lakes forest, photographed across four seasons. It asks a question I could not answer in words: how do you witness life continuing while your own has stopped?

I chose to work entirely in black and white. In the months after the loss, the world seemed drained of color, and I wanted the images to be honest about that. But the choice became more than mood. Without color, the seasons cannot announce themselves through easy signals like autumn gold or spring green. What remains is light, texture, and shadow: the grain of birch bark, the breath of a deer in cold air, an opening in the maples. Black and white strips a scene to its essentials, as grief does, and holds darkness and light, absence and presence, together in a single frame.

The project follows one herd of white-tailed deer, a doe, her two grown daughters, and a young buck at the margin, through the same stand of sugar maple and white pine, from the bare silence of winter, to the return of geese in spring, to the arrival of a spotted fawn in summer. The herd is the thread. Their return, season after season, became a witness to my own endurance. They were unbothered by my sorrow, and in that indifference I found something merciful: a world that continues and does not ask me to be finished grieving. Like coyotes lurking amongst the brush, grief too, lurks in every corner.

The work resists the idea that grief is something to overcome. It proposes grief as a companion carried through time, like a river carrying stone, wearing it smooth, never losing it, only learning its shape.

I hope the work offers other bereaved viewers what the forest offered me: permission to carry the weight, and evidence that life, relentless and quiet, keeps moving alongside us.