Todd R. Forsgren

Green Flash (Negative of a Corrupted Scan of a Negative), 2019.

Making Mountains, 2018.

In 2007, I drove down this road in Coastal Texas and it was the flattest landscape I’d ever seen. So, when chance brought me back to this road again in 2018, I took a photo, and decided to make mountains on the horizon of this impossibly flat landscape.

Grizzly Battle (After Muybridge), 2022.

The white areas here depict the negative space,
In between two battling grizzly bears,
The battle lasted only four seconds,
with photos taken every 1/8th of a second.

Reversed Landscape: Waterfall Meets Tree in the Jungle, 2017.

This is a photograph of a tree and a waterfall coming together in a lush green ravine. But since the landscape is upside-down, backwards, and a negative, you might not recognize it right away.

Barrier of Moiré and Forest Edge, walnut frame and 12"x15" archival inkjet prints on rice paper, 2015.

This is a screen made of screens. Where the digital world and the natural world collide. Permeable but impenetrable. I think.

Naïve and Indulgent Nature, 1995-2000.

Every photograph of "nature" that I took before I took photography seriously.

Drawing a Spider Web with Apple's "Measure" App, 2018.

Under Construction, 2013.

Hazy Hills, © Todd R. Forsgren, 2008-2011.

I own this landscape. That’s why my name is floating in the sky. But if you send me $1.00 via PayPal or Venmo or personal check, I'll send you a version of this image without my name on it. For your own use at 4000x5000 pixels. That’s 20 megapixels for $1.00, a pretty good deal! You can do anything you want with it, except sell it to someone else. Still, if someone else wants to buy it, let me know. We can work something out, I’m sure.

Be Complex V3.0, 2009.

Years ago, Tom walked into my studio and said, “I want to hang that piece above my toilet, so I can look at it every time I take a piss.” I’d never met him before, but I knew he made paintings of beautiful naked people bathing in the sublime landscape. I think his comment to me was supposed to be an insult, but I took it as a compliment.

Years ago, William showed up at my apartment asking for money. He was angry and on coke. He had a taken out a loan from the wrong sort. But I couldn’t help. He left, creating a scene, and the last I saw of him was him pissing into the swimming pool, yelling at the top of his lungs. Then the flash of red and blue lights.  

I painted once upon a time. These are the paintings I made.

Plastic Rainbow in a Horizontal World, 2015.

I've always wanted to see what a rainbow looked like from the side, but whenever I see one it’s always from straight on: with the bow arching in front of me, broad across the landscape. So, I decided to try to make it happen in my studio. One morning, with a few transparent strips of plastic and a light rain and soft wind blowing through the open window, I finally saw this vision. It was everything I’d hope for.

Global Roasting, 2013.

Imaging living on a planet with five suns… Consider the path that that plant might follow: It’d be a wonky, bumpy, and irregular orbit, traveling around the center of the system’s mass. Every once-in-a-while, the suns might line up, and you could see them all rise or set in unison. Or three rising while two sets. Simultaneous sunrise and sunset. Imagine the beauty of that! The planet might be considerably hotter than ours, but maybe not. Certainly the seasons would be complicated. But if you lived on that planet, you'd adapt. It would become utterly ordinary. There'd be overpasses and parking lots, and there’d even be street lights, just in case none of the suns were up in the sky.

Blue Screens, cyanotypes, 2016.

I like to imagine that my great great great grandmother made these cyanotypes between 1877-1879. She lived in Finland, just north of the Arctic Circle near a town called Pello. Then, perhaps the images were brought to America by her granddaughter (my great grandmother) along with a note on why she created them. Maybe it said:

"I made these when I was a young woman, before I had children, using a photographic process called cyanotype. The images were supposed to remind me of Finland during the summer: cool winds blowing, waves over the water, and the bright blue sky. During the cold dark winters, I would gaze at the images for hours and remember the longer days and warmer temperatures. I think that it was the only thing that kept me alive during some of those winters. Now that you're moving on to new opportunities in America, you should have them, so you can look at them and remember your homeland."

In this imagined history, these were made just before Muybridge started creating his motion studies. They’re a 'first' of a sort: the first screens, a paper predecessor of televisions. They look almost like flickering screen: still but suggesting motion. The color of the sky and water, of course, like an infinite rift on the Finnish flag. But also like the 'blue screens' that (along with green screens) are used in the world of special effects to create the illusion of a different space. Blue screens. B.S. Bull shit. Photography can certainly lie to us. And sometimes I like to let it.

Alpha and Omega, 2004-2010.

I’ll admit it: I’ve taken A LOT of photographs of sunrises and sunset. I just can’t resist photographic candy like that. It’s delicious. For a long time, I felt guilty about this. Like I used to feel about other things after twelve years of Catholic school. But this image is an embrace of that opulence: A photographic blending of hundreds of pictures I’ve taken of sunsets and sunrises, presented simultaneously.

Faux Northern Lights, 2013.

I've only seen the Northern Lights twice; both times they were faint and fleeting. The photos I've seen are so much more vibrant. Which made me jealous. But in the darkroom, I figured out a way to fake it.

The Spins, 2017.

One day I was walking through the forest when I turned my head upwards to look at a bird, and the whole world started spinning. Uncontrollable vertigo, and soon I was clutching the earth and vomiting. Miles from anywhere, I laid against the earth, unsure if the spinning would ever stop. But two minutes later, it had, I stood up and I walked out of the forest.

The Most Primal Landscape (44% blue over 555nm), 2017.

555 nanometers and 44% blue. These two numbers represent, to me, the complicated relationship between our biology and our culture. Nature and nurture, if you will. In an Artworld that is often driven by cultural context, they’re an expression of our inability to escape this biology. Such precise values, however, seem oddly analytic given this primal and prehistoric nature. And so, I used these to colors, one as land and one as sky, to create the most minimal landscape I could think of, and perhaps the least photographic image I’ve made in years.

Human eyes are most sensitive to light with a wavelength of around 555 nanometers. A fresh shade of green close to the color of new plant growth. Perhaps it’s so that our ancestors could locate nice fresh growth to eat during hunter-gatherer times. Or maybe it even developed during human’s long history with agriculture, as our ancestors tried to assess the health of the crops they were growing. It’s impossible to know exactly why; we can’t use the scientific method on prehistory, so it’s all just guessing and storytelling.

With remarkable global conservation, across countries and cultures (as per Komar and Melamid’s surveys in the early 1990s), blue is the most popular color. Conducted for the sake of conceptual art, this is the only scientific survey on this subject that I could find. I extrapolated from their survey in America, where 44% of the population’s favorite color is blue. To absurdly imagine this color as a precise shade, based on the mixing of RGB color channels, I also included the runner’s-up for favorite color: 12% green and 11% red.

Clean End Derived from the Beginning, 2017.

Is photography dead? Is photography over? Every so often people ride that pony around and it’s interesting and maybe even useful to think about. But it’s a dead end. And this is a dead end too. Well, at least it’s the last image in this sprawling series of mine… This last photograph is a cleaned-up version of the first photograph by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826. It’s my futile attempt to tie a bow around the medium’s complicated history. Here, all that remains of the view from his studio is a gradient of sky and the lozenge shaped form of the roof of the building across the street. I shape I’m obsessed with.