Happy Winter Solstice!
It is the day of rejuvenation and the promise of the light’s return! To celebrate the day, we present a few pages and page-spreads from Winter, a photo-bookwork by noted Milwaukee photographer, writer, environmentalist, and photo book artist Eddee Daniel, published in 2015 by his own Moonfire Press. All the photographs were taken in and around Milwaukee. Be sure to click on the images for details.
Much like the Solstice, Eddee’s work is about balance, or rather the restoration of balance. His concern is our own inability or unwillingness to achieve a balance with the natural world, but his hope lies in the understanding that in the end, nature finds its own way. Eddee writes:
One of the unfortunate consequences of the human drive to tame wilderness and build cities is a well-documented alienation from nature. When we don’t feel ourselves to be embedded in nature, nature becomes abstract, something to be exploited and abused. In the northern climates the snowy winter season itself reduces the already altered landscape to nearly pure abstraction. The starkness of this phenomenon can be interpreted as annihilation or opportunity -- the metaphorical blank canvas. I am interested in how we perceive nature and its relationship with humanity and our impacts upon the land. The natural world has been reduced largely to fragments within a context of built and altered environments. Winter is a meditation on abstract landscapes.
May you find your balance restored on this most important day of the year. Happy Winter Solstice!
View our other Winter Solstice posts.
