Todd Forsgren, The World is Round, My Dream Sky in Moloka’i, 2025

Over the past few weeks, I have interviewed three different photographers whom I chose because of their work related to the environment. As I studied their work and asked them questions, the more it resonated; they are all searching for a larger truth through imagery and their use of the camera. The work they create connects to personal, historical, and scientific meanings, as well as mere curiosity. It is about sustaining nature while also seeking a connection and a more profound understanding, working towards symbolic production. 

Today, I will introduce Todd R. Forsgren‘s work.

Todd’s work is playful, thoughtfully explained, and rooted in his insatiable curiosity. His photographs aim to expand both his and his viewer’s understanding of history, human perception, our relationship with science and technology, and the ecological crisis we face. He does this all in a poetic manner. Writing seems integral to his artistic process; it offers a moment for the audience to be in his head, providing conceptual frameworks and further exploration of how these elements come together. However, a larger part of his practice involves dissecting photography itself. 

Taking a close look at his process and series reveals a great deal to consider; I encourage everyone to do so. I’ve had the opportunity to ask Todd a few questions. My discussion with Todd explores the generative relationship between image and text in Forsgren’s practice, his evolving methodologies, and the overarching questions that guide his sustained engagement with photography, ecology, and the act of seeing.

-Sarah Knobel

Todd Forsgren, The World is Round, 999 Attempts to Create a Perfect Orange Eclipse (1 star), 2019.

Sarah Knobel: The writing accompanying your projects feels deeply embedded in your artistic practice, more so than what we often see in traditional artist statements. Take, for instance, your introduction to The World is Round: you trace the human reliance on sensory experience and the shifting paradigms brought about by science and technology in our pursuit of awareness and understanding. Or in Full Fathom Five, where the title’s reference to Shakespeare’s The Tempest becomes a poetic entry point into conversations about oceanic biodiversity and our innate curiosity toward the unknown. And these are only the introductions—each series continues to unfold visually and textually with remarkable depth.

Your texts ground the work in historical and contemporary cultural contexts, drawing on scientific reference points. They reveal something essential about how your mind works during the creative process. I’m curious—how does a project typically begin for you? Does the idea precede the image, or does the image initiate the idea? Could you walk us through how your process usually unfolds?

Todd Forsgren: Yes, at the risk of over explaining things, I tend to write a lot about my work.  And the process of writing is also generative for me in terms of developing new ideas.  That said, I wouldn’t say there is a way that a project “typically” begins…Each series has its own story.  The Post-industrial Edens series began organically (pun intended): I was living in a big city for the first time, Boston in 2004, and started walking around a large community garden to get some green time in. I brought my camera along and found endless material to work with there, which eventually led to trying to create a global survey of urban and community gardening.  Birdwatching has been a passion since I was a boy, and I always knew that I wanted to make images of birds, but it was a moment of inspiration that led me to start the Ornithological Photographs series…By the end of a two mile walk, I knew how I wanted the images to look, it just took a while to sort through the technical and logistical challenges there.

Todd Forsgren, Ornithological Photos, Collared Aracari (Pteroglossus torquatus).

Full Fathom Five was a follow up to that series, looking similarly at the confluence of photographic object and scientific specimen while traversing that line between photography’s ability to measure and its ability to express emotions.  As for the World is Round, compared to my other series that are, at their core, typologies, I wanted to make work that was constantly revising itself and that each image was “new” in a certain way.  Teaching, too, really fueled that series: talking to students daily where so many ideas and processes are fresh for them has helped to keep my brain plastic and generates lots of new ideas!

Todd Forsgren, Full Fathom Five, Ex. Ex. Colonies.

SK: In The World is Round, your practice encompasses a range of photographic methods and aesthetics, yet there is a clear sense of continuity throughout. In this series, you integrate found materials—such as a strip of film discovered on the beach—while employing cameraless techniques for some images, and engaging deeply with digital manipulation in others. Despite the variety, certain consistencies stand out, such as the use of grids as a structural element across series. How do you arrive at decisions about process and presentation? And in your view, what visual throughlines or themes remain constant across your body of work?

Todd Forsgren, The World is Round, Readymade – The Color of Water, 2020.

TF: Most of my series are very constant in terms of the imagery, aesthetics, and tools used. But The World is Round is certainly an outlier, constantly morphing and using different approaches.  The past twenty years have been a really remarkable time in photography, where it seems like every day some new technology is being born and some old technology is dying.  With the new technology, it’s fun to see where there are hiccups and in the old it’s fun to see how I can squeeze an image out of it that reinvigorates the technology or a photographic trope.  I have a freezer full of weird old films and boxes of various media and materials.  In that series, I’ve tried to create a scaffolding for different ideas.  So while all of the images are, to some degree, based on how our eyes and our technologies mediate our understanding of the landscape, there are seven chapters I’ve created as sub-themes. Similarly, the five chapters of Full Fathom Five consider five of the most pressing ecological threats facing the oceans.

Todd Forsgren, The World is Round, The Watermelon Camera, 2022.

Todd Forsgren, The World is Round, The Watermelon Camera, 2022.

SK: Would you talk more about the sub-themes of the Full Fathom Five – some of your visual decision-making and personal background for you in this work?

TF: Sure, but of course I’m going to have to take you WAAAY back: I grew up along the shores of Lake Erie in the 1980’s and 1990’s, a bit west of Cleveland, Ohio, a city dubbed the “Mistake on the Lake” in part due to environmental reasons.  Our river had caught on fire due to pollution and invasive species were rampant.  That was my background for environmental issues.  After that, I researched community and ecosystem ecology of sand dunes and the intertidal zone in college.  And I love being in and on the water.  So yeah, like birds, something I knew I wanted to photograph.  And so I mapped out the ecological issues facing the oceans, photographic techniques/aesthetics, and other resources/connections that I had. I just kinda kept playing around with them for a while. Given the poem from the Tempest, Full Fathom Five, I knew I wanted to have five chapters.  That’s the depth, by the way, that in Shakespeare’s time they felt anything sinking beneath was irrevocably lost, it’s about 30 feet deep.  If you’re familiar with Mark Lombardi’s work, my drafts kind of look like how he progressed through his work of financial systems.  Ultimately it’s some combination of biodiversity, water quality, overfishing, and ocean plastics mixed with cyanotypes, expired film, appropriated images from biologists, scanned object, color infrared film, early color photographic technology, and more! A few years ago, I went back to a bioluminescent bay in Puerto Rico that I used to live near in 2009.  I tried to photograph it then, but I couldn’t with the maximum ISO of my camera, 6400.  But with improvements in light sensitivity since then, I was able to dangle my camera over the bay and photograph the paths of individual dinoflagellates zipping through the water and make an image that, to me, looks like a galaxy.  

Todd Forsgren, Full Fathom Five, Hydrophilic & Hydrophobic

Todd Forsgren, Full Fathom Five, Seeing Seafood, 2704 Flying Fish Eggs (Tobiko), 2022

SK: Examining your projects collectively, I see a sustained inquiry into humanity’s need to categorize and comprehend what lies beyond our grasp—a desire for relevance in the face of complexity. At the same time, a meta-conversation is happening about photography itself—its complex relationship with truth and fiction. Would you agree? How would you define the overarching concerns or questions that drive your work?

TF: Categorization and complexity for sure!  Craftsmanship and concept too, to name a few more Cs.  I also love to try to connect perceived opposites: science and art, representation and abstraction, experimentation and observation, tradition and innovation, rational and intuitive.  Yes, categorization is essential to how we understand the world, but as soon as we name something, it also often creates imperfect boundaries. So I like to play with all these ideas while also asking the viewer to think about the climate crisis and ecological issues that face the world.  It is important to have many angles to approach each image, so that a person who knows about John James Audubon, the history of color infrared photography, or island biogeography might think about the image in front of them in certain ways, but that a viewer who doesn’t know about any of those contexts will still have a way to engage with the work.

Todd Forsgren, Full Fathom Five, Autonomous Reef Monitoring Structures

SK: You often work on multiple projects concurrently, with images evolving over several years. How do you determine when a project has reached its conclusion—or when it’s time to let it rest?

TF: That’s a good question.  And I have mostly flippant answers… For Ornithological Photographs, there are 57 images in the portfolio, and I figured if that was enough variety for Heinz and their ketchups, it was enough for the series (by the way, Heinz picked that number because it “sounded and felt mystical” which is kind of amazing to have that much riding on a condiment).  Most series become “finished” when I publish a book about them.  But ultimately, when I have so many pots simmering at once, I guess I just choose to work on what I feel most compelling at the moment. When I stop working on something, it’s done.

Todd Forsgren, The World is Round, One Mile Panorama in North Dakota, 2018.

SK: Are there any new projects you’re working on that you’d like to share?

TF: I am not ready to share images, but I have a few teasers…one new project involves the plants and animals in my home and yard.  From the most similar contemporary tulip to Semper augustus (the tulip that reached a dizzyingly high value during the Dutch Tulip Craze) to the poison dart frogs that I’m breeding.  Another that I’m working on this summer is about pictures of women.  I’m not much of a portrait photographer, so I am not actually taking any pictures of women to make this book, but it uses images to trace the history of MIT scientists using images from Playboy magazines in their work about digital technology to new artificial intelligence image generation and the fake identities created by pig butchering scamsters.

Todd Fosgren, The World is Round, Supernovas from Mix CDs: Documentation of the Obliteration of Information, silver gelatin prints, 2016.

Bio:

Todd R. Forsgren uses photography to examine themes of ecology, climate change, perceptions of landscape, and social justice while striving to strike a balance between art history and natural history. To do so, he employs a range of approaches, from documentary strategies to experimental techniques.

Forsgren lives in Billings, Montana where he is an Associate Professor of Art at Rocky Mountain College and also serves as the director of the Ryniker-Morrison Gallery.  Todd runs the Dipper Artist-in-Residence Program and AgX Photographic Services. He is working hard to get Pryor Press and Specular Highlights up and running!  Todd is proud to collaborate with artists, art historians, curators, and friends as part of Spectacle Box,  Atlantika Collective, and  f/4.5 Collective.

Todd earned a BA in biology and visual art from Bowdoin College and has a MFA in photography from J.E. Purkyne University. He was an artist-in-residence at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, the Artist’s Enclave at I-Park, and Maryland Hall for Creative Arts as well as a Fulbright Fellow in Mongolia.

Forsgren’s photographs have been featured in National Geographic, Slate,  Wired,  The Guardian,  Nature,  and even Cosmopolitan. They’ve been shown at numerous venues including the New Art Museum (a branch of the National Museum of Poland, in Gdansk), the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Missoula Art Museum, the Yellowstone Art Museum, the Noorderlicht Photography Festival, the Academy Art Museum, the Rotterdam Photo Festival, the Indian Photography Festival, Koenig & Clinton, Carroll & Sons, Heiner Contemporary, and Jen Bekman Gallery.

You can see more of Todd’s work on his website, https://www.toddforsgren.com/ and follow him on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/todd.forsgren