Photographer and filmmaker, Rita Leistner, blends fine art with documentary in her intensely lit, unstaged, metaphorically-inspired environmental portraits of the tree planters reforesting the cut blocks devastated by commercial logging. 

In this conversation, Rita Leistner 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