On a drive through the Columbia River Gorge, I stopped at Rooster Rock State Park. The river was so high that day there really wasn’t much of a beach, so I wandered into the woods instead and started taking photos in the grass and around the trees.
I was trying to keep the shoot playful and grounded. Sometimes when I feel pent up, my body reacts to being naked with more energy than I actually want in the image. I see that as a natural body response, but I also don’t want the photos themselves to become too explicit. So I kept moving, exploring, climbing, and looking for something that felt more like me.
I found this old mossy tree and immediately wanted to photograph myself naked with it. It had these big limbs stretching out over the grass. To me, it felt like a great place to experiment with the body as part of the landscape.
I started simply, walking around the tree and figuring out how I wanted to interact with it. Pretty quickly, though, walking around it turned into climbing it.
I worked my way onto one of the larger branches and found a pose I really liked. Lying there against the tree felt strange and peaceful at the same time, almost like I had found a little platform built into the woods just for the photo.
Then I adjusted my position for another shot, shifted my weight a little too far, and suddenly I was no longer posing in the tree. I was falling out of it!
Somehow I landed on my feet in the grass like a very ungraceful leopard. It hurt less than I expected, I laughed at myself, checked that everything still worked, and then did what any sensible photographer would do: kept taking pictures.
I was done with this tall wise tree so I went looking for something more my height. I found this scraggy tree and experimented with different poses with it.
Tree Dream ended up being one of my favorite images from the day. So somehow the shoot that included falling naked out of a tree still ended exactly where I wanted it to: with an image that felt natural and completely at home in the woods.