Forests of Latvia, Alan Gignoux

The ‘Forests of Latvia’ project started back in October 2017. Photographer Alan Gignoux was chosen to take part in a residency at The Rucka Centre in Cesis which is around forty-five minutes outside of Riga and based next to Gauja National Park. The residency intended to bring together different types of artists and creative people to produce work that addresses social and environmental issues. Alan spent his residency exploring the National Park and other areas of dense woodland with the intention of documenting the destruction often caused by the logging industry, where little consideration is paid to regeneration.

The newspaper ended up reflecting what would be lost if large areas of timber are eventually consumed rather than documenting destruction left behind. This is not to say that those industrial landscapes do not exist, only that we chose to focus on what remains, with small fragments of industry creeping into the photographs alongside the endless trees protected by the National Park.

We decided we wanted to create something tangible that would be viewed at a slower pace. The broadsheet newspaper is an unwieldy bit of print that has to be viewed slowly. The dimensions gave us an opportunity to stop people in their tracks, with the huge double-page spreads transporting people into this beautiful landscape.

Producing things made of paper, especially when the basis of your project was to highlight the impact of the timber industry can feel problematic, however, we truly believed that viewing these huge images in print will have a far more significant impact than viewing them on a screen. The fact that Newspaper Club allows people to print in such short runs, an option not usually available for this format, enabled us to think carefully about how many copies were needed, allowing for a print on demand service, ultimately saving the valuable resource we were hoping to highlight and protect.