The White Wood lies within the Dart Valley, where the River Dart moves through steep wooded slopes. The woodland is part of Britain’s rare temperate rainforest, a complex living system in which trees, mosses, lichens, liverworts, fungi and micro-organisms exist in intricate relationships. Its richness exists both above and below ground: in the visible architecture of branches and roots, and in unseen networks beneath the forest floor.

The photographs were made exclusively in the depths of winter, when the absence of foliage reveals the underlying structures of the woodland and exposes relationships between trees, stone, water and organic growth. The book is structured around a descent from the openness of the moor into the enclosed world of the valley, where visible and unseen worlds exist alongside one another.

The conditions in which the photographs were made become part of the images themselves. Rain, mist and wind are recorded rather than simply encountered. Long exposures hold movement and stillness simultaneously: areas exposed to the wind dissolve into traces of motion while sheltered forms retain remarkable clarity and detail. The resulting images contain layers of time and experience, mirroring the layered nature of the landscape itself.

The work continues the tradition of landscape photography while approaching the subject from a more immersive and contemplative perspective. There is an echo of the nineteenth-century American landscape photographers Carleton Watkins and Timothy H. O’Sullivan, who used photography as a means of survey and record, photographing landscapes before they had entered the cultural imagination of a wider audience. Their photographs helped make those landscapes visible. There is also a connection with John Blakemore’s layered photographic constructions, in which multiple exposures and found elements accumulate forms, textures and tonal relationships within a single image.

The White Wood presents Dartmoor not as a fixed landscape but as a living process: a place where growth, collapse and renewal occur continuously, shaped by forces that began long before us and will continue long after we are gone.