“Nature here is vile and base. I wouldn’t see anything erotical here. I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and… growing and… just rotting away. Of course, there’s a lot of misery,” Werner Herzog said in Burden of Dreams , the Les Blank documentary about the making of Herzog’s epic Fitzcarraldo.
It’s hard not to hear the German director intoning that speech while looking at Wouter Van de Voorde’s photos of the rainforests in the Illawarra region of New South Wales, which we spotted on Booooooom Design. The greenery is lush and tropical, but the Australia-based photographer relies on the low ambient light deep within the woods to capture the landscape, lending an eerie aura to the images. We sense the stillness amongst the woods, but twisting trees and thick brush seem to thrum with something more ominous.
Photo credit: Wouter Van de Voorde
Photo credit: Wouter Van de Voorde
Photo credit: Wouter Van de Voorde
Photo credit: Wouter Van de Voorde
Photo credit: Wouter Van de Voorde
Photo credit: Wouter Van de Voorde
Photo credit: Wouter Van de Voorde
Photo credit: Wouter Van de Voorde
Photo credit: Wouter Van de Voorde
Photo credit: Wouter Van de Voorde
Photo credit: Wouter Van de Voorde
Photo credit: Wouter Van de Voorde
Photo credit: Wouter Van de Voorde