When Stars Come Close: The Aspen Project
When Stars Come Close: The Aspen Project
2013-2015
Like many people who live in the Mountain West, I love to witness the turning of the aspen leaves in the fall. As a photographer, I find the tens of thousands of over-saturated, gaudy photographs of this otherwise beautiful occurrence to be an unfortunate state of affairs. But this is too easy a statement to make. The deeper issue, I think, is that aspen trees have been photographed with great affection by both earnest amateurs and celebrated photographers for many decades, and the result is that these images, poor or splendid, no longer have the capacity to surprise us.
There is a tiny window of time every autumn, late in the season and never more than two weeks in length, when most of the leaves have dropped from the trees, leaving them skeletal and fragile. But the few leaves that remain shimmer all the brighter for their scarcity, and have always looked to me like stars, lingering in the branches. This is what I’ve been after during my own forays into the aspen stands, on chilly October days with the snow threatening. I hope the resulting images say something new about the mystery and
transience of the season, when the stars come down into the aspen groves, for just a little while.