Oregon photographer Nancy Floyd documents our connection to trees

When Guggenheim award-winning photographer and Bend resident Nancy Floyd takes on a project, she’s in it for the long haul. She began her best-known project, “Weathering Time,” in 1982. Just out of grad school at Cal Arts, she planned to take a single picture of herself in her apartment every morning for 20 years to capture how she aged. But the most striking aspect of this collection isn’t the change we see in Floyd in pictures that show her with friends, family, pets, and the clothing and objects that mark each time period, but how her world — and by extension ours — changes, with the people and things that anchor us shifting as the years accumulate.

After a first exhibition of this collection at the 20-year-mark, Floyd understood that its true power would be to record her entire life. At the 39-year mark, the collection was published as a book, and now, in her 60s, she continues to take her daily picture.

Until her first trip to Death Valley in 2009 Floyd thought of herself as an environmental/documentary/portrait photographer. During that trip she learned that her mother was dying, and within the next month her mother passed away. The next year, when Floyd began visiting Death Valley with the idea of getting away and mourning her mother in the beautiful desert landscape, her work began to change. The photographs she was taking were becoming more conceptual, more an exploration of her connection to the environment than a recording of the environment itself. Her lens was capturing not just the wider expanses of the landscape surrounding her, but the more intimate signs and marks of her presence within it.

After her third visit she realized she could do a project about her time there, and her focus would be more on personal space and connection, a significant shift from her documentary work. The resulting body of work became the exhibition “Walking Through the Desert with My Eyes Closed.” “The desert is big and vast,” she says. “How can you tell the story of the desert? I can tell the story of me, in the desert.”

Floyd’s current project, “For the Love of Trees,” embraces her love of the natural world, combining both documentary and more personal photography to explore how, as a culture and as individuals, we relate to and work to sustain Oregon’s forests. Inspired after meeting scientists working at the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest in the central Cascades, Floyd began taking her camera into the woods, spending time with and photographing key forest stakeholders — those who study trees, protect trees, make a living off of trees, and those who see trees as part of their daily life. These stakeholders, she says, include scientists, National Park Service rangers, firefighters, loggers, environmentalists and Indigenous people.

Now three years into this project Floyd adds to her ongoing documentary work by hiking into the forest alone, trying to make work that’s both personal and, she hopes, holds meaning for others. Her long-term goal for these photographs, she says, is to show the disparate ways we humans rely on trees, and to celebrate the possibilities for positive environmental change.