Steve Pyke

The Couturie Forest is an invitation into the quiet dialogue between memory and the natural world. It is an exploration born out of almost 50 years of shooting film, mainly portraits, now reframed through an intense period of introspection. In this series, the woods become witness to both time’s passage and my subconscious, reminding me that “their merely being there / Means something.” Inspired by the late poet John Ashbery’s “Some Trees,” each image stands as its own subtle performance, silent, yet charged with a possibility of speech.  A chance encounter that became deeply intentional.

Spanning more than forty-five years, my archive, better known for portraiture, has always included landscape. Couturie Forest revisits my early 1980s forest studies. Working in the square Rolleiflex format, I treat each stand of trees as a portrait—landscape as portrait—old trees like the old faces telling their life story. Through composition, grain and light, Couturie Forest unites portrait and landscape in a single visual conversation. These images honor the personal history embedded in my archive and celebrate the enduring power of presence to evoke wonder and reflection.

These are amazing: each
Joining a neighbor, as though speech
Were a still performance.
Arranging by chance

To meet as far this morning
From the world as agreeing
With it, you and I
Are suddenly what the trees try

To tell us we are:
That their merely being there
Means something; that soon
We may touch, love, explain.

And glad not to have invented
Such comeliness, we are surrounded:
A silence already filled with noises,
A canvas on which emerges

A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.
Placed in a puzzling light, and moving,
Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense.

–  John Ashbery

Steve Pyke is a photographer and artist who lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. He is the author of nine books, including “I Could Read The Sky,” “Philosophers” and “Poguetry.” Pyke received many awards for his photography, including an MBE in 2003 and his work has appeared in the National Portrait Galleries in London and Washington, D.C., among other museums. Pyke was staff portrait photographer at The New Yorker 2004-2014. He is currently photographer in residence at the Photo Museum Ireland and his new book “Scribendi: Irish Writers 1982 -2025” is to be published in October 2025 by Lilliput Press.