One of Monastra's images of felled trees along a beach in Tonga. |
Coconut trees being killed by rising sea levels. By Carolyn Monastra |
Monastra's photographs are not harangues, nor artificially strident. They are eloquent, honest, and often disturbing testimony to the damages being wrought on ecosystems around the world.
From Monastra's photographs during a trip along Rio Negro and the Amazon rainforest. |
She received a MFA from Yale, coming to it after being in social work for a number of years. Not the typical background for a photo-world insider. The combination does, however, make for an interesting blog that is also worth looking at, and has resulted in appealing photographs worth reading about for their implicit meanings as well as their surface pleasures and technical accomplishment.
(I should note, too, that I am strongly affected by trees, and Carolyn's use of trees as symbols of climate change has great resonance for me. I wonder if she's ever seen Jeff Krueger's study of trees that have witnessed historic events? Or Janelle Lynch's "portraits" of tree stumps in her Akna project (in her book Los Jardines de Mexico (Radius, 2011) and soon on display at the Southeast Museum of Photography in Daytona Beach, FL)?)
Carolyn Monastra's blog, The Witness Tree
Monastra's web site
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