Rowan O'Brien
"Echoes of Silence" follows me as I retrace my steps as a teenager struggling with depressive thoughts and the loneliness of living in an isolated location in Wicklow. This body of work has been inspired by many different sources, none as important as the well renowned landscape photographer Jim Southam. Southam has provided many means of developing a project. One that inspired this project heavily was his idea of shooting and reshooting a project over a span of months to years.
Echoes of Silence
To better understand society’s reliance on forests, we also have to recognise the role that the forest plays in our human consciousness. In this project, I am photographing the relationship between trees and people, revealing the aspects of community and interdependency that they share. I am also using this reflection on the cultural bonds between people and trees to represent the duality of my own emotional life. By combining landscape and portrait images, I explore the loneliness I experienced in my early years growing up near the forests of Wicklow. These images were made by using a method of re-walking the routes that I took as a teenager struggling with depression. They are contrasted with portraits of my family, some of whom are pictured in their own spaces, while others are seen crossing that invisible line to join me in the forest.
Photobook
Echoes of Silence follows the routes through Forests local to my childhood home with a focus on feeling of depression anxiety and loneliness and how they effected both my childhood as well as how they have changed the person I am today.