J. Sybylla Smith, In Conversation with Rita Leistner
Episode #51, Summary
Forest For The Trees: The Tree Planters is an allegorical homage to the essential tree-planting professionals laboring in the wilderness of western Canada.
Episode Notes
Photographer and filmmaker Rita Leistner blends fine art with documentary in her intensely lit, un-staged, metaphorically-inspired environmental portraits of the tree planters reforesting cut blocks devastated by commercial logging.
In this conversation, Rita discusses, among other things:
Uncanny use of light
An innate sense of composition
Feeling not with the heart or head — but with the spine
The power of artificial lighting
What makes communities work
Bush legs and tree eyes
Capturing visual vocabulary in the real world
Light as media
The whiteness of the whale
Living the work
Referenced in the episode
Looking for Marshall McLuhan in Afghanistan by Rita Leistner
The Edward Curtis Project: A Modern Picture Story by Marie Clements and Rita Leistner
Six Million Trees by Kristel Derkowski
Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018) by RaMell Ross
The Sympathizer (2021) by Don McKellar
Published by Dewis Lewis Publishers