Aperture is a photography magazine based out of New York. They also have an gallery. One of their current shows is "Sawdust Mountain Photographs by Eirik Johnson". The website is showing only a few of the images, likely they'd rather have you come to the show and look at them there after paying for admittance, but I'm not in New York, so I'm limited to what they have posted.
"Eirik Johnson: Sawdust Mountain" focuses on the tenuous relationship between industries reliant upon natural resources and the communities they support. Timber and salmon are the bedrock of a regional Northwest identity, but the environmental impact of these industries is increasingly at odds with the contemporary ideal of sustainability. In this exhibition Eirik Johnson reveals a landscape imbued with an uncertain future—no longer the region of boomtowns built upon the riches of massive old growth forests. "Eirik Johnson: Sawdust Mountain" records a region affected by historic economic complexities and, by extension, aspects of our fraught relationship with the environment in the twenty-first century.
Most of the images I can see are sad and quiet. They tell the tale of a town that used to be full of life, all hustle and bustle. Now most of the people have moved on and the ones that remain are quietly just barely keeping things running until the certain end. The images are eerie in that way.
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