Five questions with ‘Lost and Found’ exhibit photographer Miles Lowry
Photographer Miles Lowry started a quest in 1998 to document the "subtle grandeur" of old-growth forests and savannas in the eastern United States.
Over the course of a dozen years, the St. Charles resident traveled the country dedicating himself to photographing these beautiful areas before they were lost forever.
He started this project in 1998 and ended it about 15 years ago.
"I've always sought to express my love for the natural environment with photographs," Lowry said of his career and what motivated him to begin his photo project.
A collection of these photos is now on display at the Forest Preserve District’s Four Rivers Environmental Educational Center in Channahon. The “Lost and Found: Remnants of Savannas and Old-Growth Forests” exhibit is on loan from the Chicago Botanic Garden and it runs through Dec. 29. The exhibit is sponsored by The Nature Foundation of Will County.
The photos in the exhibit are from the period 2001 to 2010. His images are often presented as constructed panoramas — several square images combined into one multiple-framed composition.
We asked Lowry five questions via email to find out more about his life and his motivation for the photos that make up the exhibit. Here are his responses:
What prompted you to begin photographing forests and savannas?
I'm a retired advertising photographer in Chicago. When I was near the end of my photo career, I taught landscape and studio photography at The College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn. While there, I began to realize that I was not aware of any existing images which celebrated the subtle grandeur of Eastern Old Growth forests. I was excited about the prospects of discovering unknown remnants of our forested past. My interest was to excite people about Old Growth and to create a project which had not been done before. I had grown tired of the clichéd treatments of American grandeur such as Ansel Adams' pictures of the West. It was time to celebrate the forested subtlety and complexity remaining EAST of the Mississippi.
Where did you go to take your photos?
This project enabled me to visit The Great Smokey Mountains National Park, Porcupine Mountains State Park in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Beall Woods near Carmel Illinois, remnant savannas in the Chicago area and the Ozarks, walnut groves of Wyalusing State Park in Wisconsin, Cook Forest in Pennsylvania, Mohawk Valley State Park in Massachusetts and many other scattered remnants. I chose to use a rather conservative definition of Old Growth. The remnant had to be self-sustaining. So, I passed up visiting many small lots of remnant trees. Size of a forest was important. Bigger is indeed better when it comes to sustainability of Old Growth.
What does old growth mean to you?
Old Growth is gnarly... left untouched, forests and savannas are full of rotting fallen trees, pits and mounds of long-gone root balls and heights of trees that far exceed what we think of as max heights in controlled plots.
Why is it important to document these natural sites?
On September 11, 2001, I entered The Porkies in upstate Michigan. When I registered for my four-day trip within it, I watched replays of the first tower in New York City getting attacked. When I came out of the place, the world had changed. But the forest had not. Or should I say that the rate of change in the natural world is so very much slower than that of human events.
What motivates you in your work?
Why does any artist do what he or she does? To create some visual insight into the world that has not been considered.