Woods and Waters Land Trust is proud to announce the release of the book Woods and Waters, by local photographer Ed Lawrence, featuring a season-by-season look at the conserved lands of the lower Kentucky River watershed.
The photographs within the tome feature WWLT’s conservation-easement-protected properties, as well as our own Vaughn Branch Nature Preserve. With his stunning landscape views, Lawrence takes the reader on a behind-the-scenes tour of private forestscapes and creek beds not available to the public at large. He began working on the photographs in 2016 and made it a point to get out to each site in every season, giving the reader an intimate sense of the progression of life on these lands from one season to the next.
Lawrence says he let each property provide its own inspiration for the photographs in Woods and Waters, sometimes quietly entering the forest and waiting until a beautiful spot revealed itself for a photograph, and sometimes entering excitedly, shooting like crazy. However, the biggest link he found among the properties were the native flowers. “The wildflowers were things along the way that really captured my attention,” he says. “It was kind of a meditative experience for me.”
Alongside the landscape shots of the eight different woodland locations, readers will find photos of two dozen identified native plants, along with the date Lawrence captured the photo, a helpful detail for anyone wandering the woods trying to identify flowers themselves.
Sales of Woods and Waters kicks off at WWLT’s Land Extravaganza event on Sept. 11 from 5-8 p.m. Books cost $40 and all proceeds will benefit WWLT. After the event, books can be purchased online.
Ed Lawrence is also the photographer behind the book Kentucky 120, featuring landscape photos from all of Kentucky’s 120 counties. He got his photography start as an 8-year-old using a Brownie instamatic camera and his neighbor’s dark room. Nowadays, he shoots everything digital and does his own printing. He recently finished his degree in Liberal Studies at University of Kentucky at the age of 72, making him the oldest graduate in the class of 2021. Woods and Waters was his capstone project.
