New Book: Witness Trees Vol. 1

After ten years of working on the Witness Tree project, the time has come to share some of what I have seen. To that end I have finished the first of three handmade books. Volume 1 contains sixteen images and two essays. Each volume will be a run of 10 editions with 4 artist proofs. All pages are printed with archival inks.

In 2015 I began researching crime maps in St. Louis to find the locations of gun-related homicides. Growing up there, gun violence and daily shootings on the news shaped my perspective of the place, and created a lens of fear through which the world had to pass. I wanted to see the places where so much of my fear had come from, to see that these are places where regular people have regular struggles every day and, in the cases of my pictures, end in tragic ways. So I traveled to the sites on the map, identified any trees that may have been “witness” to the event, and made photographs of them.

This project started in St. Louis and has expanded to 15 other cities since I began. Editing is often the biggest challenge in photography and that certainly proved to be true when sifting through the 500+ Witness Tree images to find this group of sixteen. Helping to pull the images together is an essay by the artist John O’Donnell and a project statement by me. I am so grateful to John for contributing a piece of his poignant and effortless writing.

If you are interested in a book please send me an email.

Witness Trees: Vol. I details:
archival artist book
24pp
16 images
2 essays
edition 10 with 4 ap
$100


Thank you.