Intoduction to Forrest Wasko’s photography

Today I am very pleased to present photographic work of Forrest Wasko. This short piece, an introduction to his work, will initiate a series of this week’s posts: first an interview, then an opportunity to showcase one project and finally a selection of one photo picked from the images published during the whole week, which will be later printed on a t-shirt.

Forrest Wasko is an American photographer currently living in Minneapolis and pursuing a BFA in photography at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

There is a strange mystery and anxiety to Forrest’s images I find so mesmerizing. He captures it beautifully in the photograph of two girls from his ”In the Land of Color” series. One of them is looking straight ahead, her gaze fixed outside the frame. We don’t see the face of the second girl as she has turned her head away. We don’t see what has caught her attention. But there is something disturbing in the whole scene. Both of the women are separated from the dark background by the warm light sculpting their backs. This very skilful use of cinematic light suddenly makes the background – a cold geometry of the house and the dark shivering mass of the leafs – a looming threat behind the gentle radiance of the two women.

There is a sort of fascination with hidden danger in Forrest’s work, like in this image of the billiard table again from his ”In the Land of Color” series. It sits heavily in the dead centre of the frame like a cenotaph – ‘’an empty tomb’’, a monument erected for a person whose remains are elsewhere.

Forrest has a great skill of inspiring the viewer’s imagination, giving you a starting point for creation of multiple possible stories. The house behind the naked trees looks both threatening and itself scared like it’s hiding behind a crumbling wall of naked branches. It is a possible crime scene as well as a quiet household of an ageing couple trying to cut themselves away from the street. The simplicity and clarity of the image also works as a straight forward document.

The below image of the woman in the red dress is another example of this brilliant starting point. We desperately want to know why she is here, what she is doing, what has just happened or is about to happen. There is that David Lynch feeling to this image.

Surprisingly Forrest is also drawn to quiet, beautiful melancholic scenes. The viewer is placed right in the middle of the scene and everything here is in your hand’s reach.

The mix of the tension and beauty in Forrest work is something I am looking forward to coming back to. I hope you are too.

If you enjoyed reading this post stay with us for more of Forrest Wasko’s photography.  Also you might want to check his website to find out more about his work.

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