Anders Holm

I make photographs the way old foresters used to mark trees — slowly, with the same hand, in places that don't notice me.

The studio began as a single notebook in a rented cabin on the island of Senja, two winters spent half-frozen at the treeline trying to learn what a fox does at four in the morning when no one is watching. The first prints I ever sold paid for the second winter. The second winter paid for the next ten years.

Everything you see here — the editions, the field journal, the commissions — comes from that same way of working. I don't shoot quickly, and I don't shoot a lot. Each photograph that makes it onto archival paper has been chosen out of thousands of frames and weeks of waiting. The slowness, I think, is what you can feel when you stand in front of it.

Most of the work doesn't happen behind the camera. It happens before — learning the species, the wind, the route the animal takes when it thinks it is alone. And it happens after — proofing, printing, rejecting, reprinting, until the paper holds what the field gave.

If you are here, thank you. If you are bringing one of these prints home, you are also bringing the cold mornings, the patient years and a small contribution to the wild places that made it possible.

— Anders Holm