IV: Breaking - Todd R Forsgren

On a Ship at Sea, Gently Rocking, 2013.

I have trouble keeping the horizon level on a good day, but it’s even worse when I’m trying to take pictures on a choppy sea, like this one. But that's why God gave us Photoshop: to straighten out those jagged edges.

Break Branches and Bending Grids

The sciences and the arts often use very different approaches to abstraction. In the sciences, for example, abstraction tends to be data driven: how can numbers show us something new about the world? In the arts, it is most famously thought of as the opposite: how can abstraction reveal expression? This divide persists in many people’s perception of the two fields: art is expressive and science is analytic. But I think of a camera as a machine that both measures and expresses. And I think of art and science as compliments.

Grids and branches represent two very different systems for interpreting and reproducing the world. They’re the underlying data of today’s image files: pixels or vectors. Both systems are incredibly useful, and which to use depends on context. Vectors are horrible at carrying photographic information. Grids (or the crystalline structure of film grain) are essential to it, but that information breaks down when magnified. But using the various systems we’ve developed to see the world together, we can find new insights and surprising images. Moiré can result in the positive and negative reinforcement of different sized grids. Branches start to entwine as vines grow together, creating knots that seem impossible to untie. Other times, these layers show the cracks in each system.

I often find one things breaks, something new begins to present itself. And I find new ideas that are hidden in the world. In ecology, for example, loose trends often leave us with scatter, and only through complicated mathematics can we map these vague trends at the abstract and penumbral edges of the world. By breaking these systems and trying to put them back together in unusual ways, I try to glimpse at the imperfect, unusual, and broken edges that are created: the remaining wildernesses.

Wrong, 2019.

I took this photograph after a rainstorm in Venice, CA. The air had that remarkable clear quality as the sun broke through the clouds as I was driving toward the ocean. Then, I left the roll of film in my pants pocket, and it went through the washing machine and drier before I realized it. I forgot about the roll for a month, and when I finally got around to developing it, mold had grown and the emulsion was peeling off the base. But a portion of this image remained intact; the only exposure out of 36 that was recognizable.

A Study of Perspective (Above, Level, and Below), 2017.

Diameter at breast height (DBH) is a standardized measurement that is used to express how large trees are as well as how dense a forest is. It’s straightforward: just take a measurement of the diameter of a tree at breast height (which is 1.3m high, by the way). But it’s controversial: despite this standard, many scientist argue the value has problematic biases. If you believe in DBH, you can measure all the trees within a given area and from these data calculate biomass of the forest. This is a hard thing to measure accurately: there are so many variables at play!

One of the tricky things about ecology is that the data we get is often very subtle and there are so many variables at play. In photography, I often call skittish ideas like this ‘penumbral.’ From one angle I can see something, but from another it’s chaos. We can best understand some concepts through statistics, which allow us to line up data about the world in a way that we can’t directly observe. To demonstrate this, I tied pink ribbons around all the trees in a forest at their DBH. I took one photograph from 0.5m above DBH, one at DBH, and one from 0.5m below DBH.

Testing the Symmetry of a Landscape, 2016.

While paddling upstream I found a circle of water lilies in the river that seemed too perfect to be true. With a diameter of about 100 feet, it was a mystery to me. What had created it? I decided to test this circle, to see if it was repeatable. I photographed it as precisely as I possibly could from my perch on the paddle board. Later that day on my computer, I mirrored it to the left and to the right. Like the father and the son and the holy spirit, each of the ensōs look unbelieve. But one is real, I swear, it's god's honest truth.

Forest Fragmented by 64 Exposures, 2013.

The world's forests are getting chopped up into smaller and smaller bits of land. This is what ecologists call forest fragmentation, and it’s really bad for ecosystems. So, keeping the horizon straight, I moved my camera in a circle, spinning it for 64 exposures and further fragmenting the small patch of forest.

A Mountain from the Sea by 32 Exposures (v1.0, in camera), 2018.

After Hokusai and Sugimoto: Wave on a Calm Day, Made from Curved Film, 2014.

To make this photograph, I took a sheet of 4x5 film and carefully curved it in a custom-made film holder. The final shape being a wave with a height of 1.5” along the long 5” side of the film. Putting this into my camera, I adjusted my focal plane so that it passed through the wave twice: Once at 1.6667” and again at 3.3333” (right at the midpoint between the peak and valley of the wave. I then went to a spot looking out at the horizon of the Atlantic Ocean on a very calm and peaceful day. And took this picture with my Schneider-Kreuznach Super-Angulon 90mm at f/5.6 for 1/500th.

When the Dam Breaks

John often talks about the Lake Missoula floods, the result of the bursting of a glacial dam 10,000 years ago. This flood emptied a lake that covered much of present day Montana in a matter of hours. A lake that was larger than all our great lakes combined. All the water rushed into the Pacific Ocean, leaving Montana high and dry. It also left huge ripple marks on the landscape of the Pacific Northwest. The statistics are mind boggling.

John was a surfer and he loved waves. In his imagination, there was a native American in his kayak out on Lake Missoula that day, relatively fresh to New World, his ancestors perhaps arriving on the continent as few as 1000 years prior. That man, in his delicate little kayak, got to experience the ultimate wave.

The breaking of that dam reshaped the American West. New worlds often result from destruction. Lately, I’ve tried to intentionally break, stretch, and crack my expectation on how a camera works and how the world is put together… What remains after I’ve broken something I deeply believed in? Nothing is precious. I often think about this draining of Lake Missoula as I click the shutter and let a rush of light into the darkness of my camera.

A Peaceful Resolution, 2017-2020.

In 1966, The Yule Log debuted. It featured four hours of a burning fireplace, along with Christmas music, and was a surprise hit, running on national TV on Christmas every year until 1989 (and it was revived again in 2001). Since that original, there have been countless imitations and updates. The Yule Log has survived the rise and fall of Betamax, VHS, Laser Disc, and DVDs, as it continues into the era of streaming service.

This video is my answer to The Yule Log. It features the destruction of three Apple products (two iPhones and an iPad) between 2017 and 2020. All three had cracked screens and were on the verge of obsolesce. They were all destroyed in the same way: by allowing a large ice cube to melt into them while playing a looped video of the surface of a swimming pool. This video documents of that process.

A Meditation on Material (Seven Accidents/Mistakes), 2019.

A lot of accidents/image happened to make this image, and they all seemed to coalesce around this one frame, in a way that made it into an interesting image:

1.) The film was ten years past its expiration date.
2.) The hand-rolled strip of color infrared 120 film got bent.
3.) This bend caused a light leak.
4.) This bend also caused the film to stick to itself.
5.) I didn't use the proper filter when exposing this frame.
6.) I under exposed this frame.
7.) The lab that developed it didn't turn off their IR lights.

18% Grey Cave with Digital Stalactites and Stalagmites, 2017.

In the movie The Matrix, the virtual computer world looks like green zeroes and ones falling across the computer screen. I saw a glimpse of that world when someone sent me this photograph of my daughter and it got clipped by an e-mail server somewhere in between.

United Nations Secretariat, 2016.

In 1951, a year before it opened, Charles Sheeler took a photograph of the UN building in New York City. This building was symbolic of a new hope in global unity, made of gleaming glass and polished concrete by Niemeyer and Le Corbusier. It was an optimistic Post-war moment and monument, at the height of faith in modernity and the potential of globalization.

Today, when I was looking at a thumbnail of the photograph on my computer, I noticed that the windows had been enveloped by a smear of moiré. The strong gridded façade became fragile and vulnerable. It looked uncanny, and I began to doubt whether this building could even exist. I hope it still can; it’s still a very beautiful dream enshrined in this impossible structure.

Parasites, Decay, and Disease, 2005.

It took me a long time to realize it, but this was the first photograph in my series The World is Round. I took it in 2005 when I was mostly painting, not taking pictures. But while walking through a forest in the Northwest, I saw three strange incidents of decay right next to each other, and made these six photographs to document those incidents.

Log Cut Multiple Times in Multiple Ways, 2006.

Over the next 150 years or so, scientists plan to return to this log at Cascade Head Experimental Forest. They’ll slice out more and more ‘cookies,’ disks of wood that they take back to the lab to measure how quickly the log is decomposing.

I’ve sliced the log with my camera as well. So, from the initial snap when this tree fell, to each of the cookies scientists have removed, and my own photographic cutting, this log has been broken eight times and in three different ways.

Like the scientists, I hope to return to this log as well and photograph it again and again as it turns back to dirt (and fungus and other plants too). And as these cookies keep getting sliced out by scientists so that we can understand this process better.

A Tree Falls in the Woods and Supports New Trees Growing up, 2022.

I first photographed this tree in 2006
(see the previous photograph). It was part of a log decomposition study.
I went to rephotographed it sixteen years later,
and the tree had all but disappeared into the soil.
But in its place was a delicate line of seedlings,
Reaching back up towards the canopy.
These are those seedlings.

Landscape Made of Noise, 2003-2013.

In graduate school, I wrote an 89,480-character long paper. It was just one of the many hoops I jumped through to get a Masters of Fine Art degree. My thesis had a long and somewhat extravagant title: "The Effects of Globalization and Digital Technology on Perceptions of Landscape." Now that thesis is locked away in an obscure university's library.

I had some insights while writing this paper, for sure, and I’m happy I did it. But I don’t expect anyone to read it. Still, I wanted to make something more tangible with all this hard work, so I pasted that long and rambling text into an image file. The file was actually the first digital photograph I ever took (which was a picture of a stormy sky full of digital noise).

This new landscape contains my entire graduate thesis; though that only takes up the bottom 1/8th of the 400x500 pixel image. Just to make sure the only those who really want to read it can get to it, I twisted it into a bit of a Rubik’s Cube. A basic bit of steganography, but if you twist this downloadable .tiff file in just the right way, it unlocks my thesis.

A Tree for Mondrian, Rorschach, Techentin, and Zimmerman, 2016.

I like order. I like different types of order. There are grids and branching patterns and symmetry. Some people use order to make art. Some use order to make science. Here, I tried to use order to make more order, and see what would happen if I tried to fit all these types of order into one image.

Todd R. Forsgren

Break Branches and Bending Grids

When the Dam Breaks