Redwood Saw ~ By Photographer Richard Rothman

When the photographer Richard Rothman was making the work that became his latest book, “Redwood Saw,” what started out as a formalist approach to documenting the humbling landscape of the old-growth redwood forest in Northern California quickly turned into a project about a boom town gone bust. As Rothman explained last week at the International Center of Photography, he eventually had to leave his tent in the forest to buy supplies, and found himself in the nearby town of Crescent City. What he saw there inspired him to expand his project to portraits of the town’s people and of the architecture of a place that was once entirely redwoods. Through excessive mining, fishing, and lumbering, Crescent City had slowly depleted the base of its economy, and in his large-format portraits Rothman shows what was left behind. “I wanted to tell a larger story about the moment we are in, here in America,” Rothman explained, “paying attention to all that I could take in.” Here’s a look.

[via the new yorker]