1:20 pm, 16Nov05, between Appleton and Sheboygan, WI.

I think I will go away for a while and photograph trees in their barest and most vulnerable stages, in the winter, when they, like the rest of us, are most honest.

Winter provides an opportunity to get away from our expedited, over-dramatized lives. It is a landscape of survival and isolation that provides no glory or reverence, just the facts. Branches prostrated against an ethereal sky, transformed into pure form, line, and space. The bareness is refreshing and alive with a certain essence of being.

to view these images, simply enter the website linked below. You can download all the images to your computer right here, or alternately the archive.org page for this collection has individual links for each image.

enter collection

we asked justine a few questions about her photography and photographic process.

This one is kind of a three-parter. How do you think of your relationship to photography? More to the point - I know you work with all sorts of different photographic processes, films, cameras, methods etc - is your work influenced by the differences in these processes? I may be inventing a division here, but these images seem to distinguish themselves from your digital work - which I think of as more kinetic - they're very still and subtle in comparison.

The process is definitely an influence. When I approach different mediums and techniques, I like to think about what kind of aesthetic that medium offers to whatever I'm doing. In this series, the act of photographing the branches and their bareness was just as important as the end product. I've been told that photographing trees is what old men do in the receding years of their life as a thing of comfort and contemplation. I like to think that photographing these branches served a similar function for me in that it gave me the opportunity to pause and take it all in. It helps that these photos were done using a medium format camera which, compared to, say, a 35mm or digital camera, forces you to slow down and think about what you're doing. The whole process was kind of a metaphor for people, and how important it is in this fast paced, material driven society to pause and bear yourself to the elements and to let yourself be taken by a moment of complete honesty and serenity. I hope that the viewer is able to feel the serenity in these photographs and to let themselves contemplate life with a clear mind. Photography is unique in that it really does make you look at things closer and with a more critical eye.

Photography has an interesting relationship to the other visual arts, I think - a photograph often carries the authority of being "real" of representing a visual fact somehow, where other mediums seem like they have an easier relationship to fiction. That documentary aspect of photography seems like it can open it up the process in a unique way to an interesting play between reality and fantasy. How do you place your work, if you had to, on a continuum between journalistic representation and the free-play of framing a fantasy?

Let me refer back to the aging old man on this one. I can't wait to be old. I have this driving desire to be a wrinkly, 86 year old synical old bat who sits on the porch in her rocking chair all day watching the cars drive by and getting up everyonce in awhile to water the plants. There's something very true about that. The problem, though, is that I'm not 86, and I've got a long ways to go before I earn the right to sit on my porch all day doing nothing. But then again, who's to say that deep down inside, I'm not already that 86 year old synical bat? I think photography has the same dilemma. Traditionally it is always tied to representation and reality, but paradoxically it is also very performative. Cindy Sherman really cracked the box on that one. So I wouldn't say that representation and fantasy exist on a continuum in photography. I really think that they coexist in image after image, and that's the beauty of it, and the reason why so many people continue to be facinated with this technology, itself very much aging.

What photographers do you admire?

Omg, I'm so into Wolfgang Tillmans right now, especially his new abstracted, non-representational photographs. They are very similar to something I've been trying to do lately myself. His approach is just perfect though. He uses pure light as the only source to create his images. Photography at its essence, a record of light. Just magnificent. He's really opened photography wide open.

What are you working on next?

I've been using a 4x5 pinhole camera with an exteremly short focal length to create non-representational photos. I'm in love with this idea of photography at its core, which is light entering a box and being recorded onto a piece of paper or sheet of film. I've done a series of black and white images with this technique and just recently I moved to color film. I'm getting really different results and it's been great. I feel like I still need to leap off the edge with this though, before I bring it back together with any real concreteness. It'll be exciting, I can't wait to get to that lift-off point.