Rooted In The Past by Ellen Borggreve

After my mum and dad died, I received a box of slides. When I looked at them it was immediately obvious that my mum had taken these. This might not mean a lot to most people, but my mum was disabled after I was under 4 years old and she had taken these slides of my in the woods. Strangely enough she had taken some of them of me on the roots of trees that I had photographed as well. I put all the slides in order and started following her footsteps through these slides, estimating where she might have gone and this became a project that has this strange coincidence of photographing rooted trees whilst tracing her footsteps and my roots. I hiked enormous distances, not always knowing precisely where she might have been, but sometimes the slide before and the one after provided me with clues. I am still working on this and I enjoy this enormously. Just knowing that these trees are witnesses of my mum walking by with me as a 2 year old is quite special. This is how this image came about on one of my long walks to trace her footsteps. These wonderful trees with their roots exposed on a loam clay slope.

This artwork is offered by Ellen Borggreve

Ellen Borggreve is a landscape photographer and author of Woodscapes and Praxisbuch Wälder fotografieren, among others. She was born and raised in the woods of the Veluwe where her love for trees originated. Besides forests she also likes to photograph Dutch coastal scenes.

The focus is on tranquil scenes that seem to lie outside everyday reality, without people in the picture, with subjects that are about to disappear often being the subject. The fleeting patterns in the sand, but especially old forest giants that are disappearing at breakneck speed due to climate change.

Ellen is an awarded photographer at 1x and was named one of the world's best landscape photographers by Photoblog in 2019. Her work has been published in books, Nature Photography Magazine, Focus, Landscape Photography Magazine, On Landscape and many other publications. She shares her knowledge gained during her long career as a soft sculpture artist and designer combined with over 40 years of experience in photography in the many articles she writes for Landscape Photography Magazine and also her own blog. She also enjoys teaching where she puts the individual vision of photographers first.

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