Since primary school, I used to go skateboarding at the indoor skatepark in Tartu during the winter. The inevitable hour-long drive home in the dark made me imagine what all the gravel roads we passed would look like under the glow of streetlights. By now, I have found a way to satisfy that curiosity.
Photography has taught me to appreciate my home region and to be grateful that, within cycling distance in every direction, there are all kinds of distinctive forests and thickets waiting to be discovered.
One of photography’s most basic roles is to capture situations that may no longer be possible to see tomorrow. At the same time, you cannot always wait for the perfect light. In a valley or deep in the forest, sunlight may not even reach the places I want to photograph. So I have cheated a little and taken the light into my own hands, staging it in the darkness of night.
I don’t want this dramatic approach to lighting to be seen as the only solution, though. Thousands of daytime photographs of forests and thickets are still sitting in my drawer, waiting for their moment in the daylight.
Instead of drawing attention to the lighting, I would like to bring the focus back to the places themselves — most of which are in my own backyard. I hope my photographs remind people that you can make cinema right where you live; you don’t have to travel abroad in search of exotic places.
There are no excuses. You just have to keep trying patiently. Things will go wrong anyway, but if you stop trying, you’ll never find out what was waiting right under your nose.
