My First Book ”Forest Whispers”

My first personal book has been published, bringing together various thoughts and nature moments that I have managed to capture and preserve in the forests dear to me. The textual part of the book is quite recent. I have been writing down some thoughts here and there after my walks for a couple of years, but I haven't been particularly consistent about it. Some wandering thoughts have also been forgotten upon getting home due to fatigue. It would of course make sense to record everything in a notebook, and no doubt I shall do so in the future.

The moments captured in the book have mostly been caught over the last three years. I tried forcibly photographing the midday forest eight years ago, but gave up on it. In the intervening years, forest photos accumulated, and in the late winter of 2015, Piret Eensoo invited me to Türi to exhibit nature photos. I had to think for quite a while about what theme I should group most of the photos under. That is how the idea for “Forest Whispers” was born, to bring together the breath of vanishing and existing forests in photographs.

The nature evening was more than well received. To my surprise, the large hall of Türi Culture House was full, around a hundred people in total, on very short notice. This gave me the inspiration to continue with this project. I ended up in the woods more than usual, almost growing as one with the forest. Hundreds of captured moments accumulated over three years, but I found that something more was needed to convey even a little bit of the atmosphere that moves through the forest. So, alongside the pictures, I began to write lines, leaving loose ends for the reader and viewer so that the latter could imagine a suitable picture for themselves. I very much hope that the browser of the pages will notice that there is indeed more to the forest than trees, or at worst, logs.

Read the interview with me too Alkeemia.ee in the environment and from the newspaper Pärnu Postimees