It feels very appropriate that the first entry in this new Journal should be about the website itself.
Appropriate, and also rather wonderfully well timed.
I hadn’t planned it this way, but as I sit down to write this first Journal entry, it is exactly ten years since I launched baxter.photos—the website that has been home to my photography for the past decade. A great deal has changed during that time, both in my work and in me, so there’s something rather serendipitous about finding myself putting the finishing touches to a completely rebuilt baxter.photos on precisely the same date, ten years later.
This isn’t simply a new coat of paint. I wanted to rethink how my photography is presented online and, more importantly, how it feels to spend time here.
The address is staying the same, and that now feels right. Over the past decade, baxter.photos has gathered a history of its own. It is how many people know and find my work, it appears in thousands of books and on business cards, and it is also my name on Instagram. Rather than leaving that history behind, I have rebuilt the home around it: somewhere not just for photographs, but for everything I do around them—prints, books, workshops, writing and whatever else might grow from my time in the woods.
Much of the work on the new site has therefore been about simplicity: making things easier to find, more enjoyable to browse and less inclined to get between you and the photographs.
A different way into the work
The Gallery has probably changed more than anything else.
For a long time I’ve been uncomfortable with the idea of organising woodland photography primarily by location. Place matters deeply when I’m making photographs, of course, but I’ve never wanted the finished work to become a catalogue of where particular trees happen to grow. The woods feel more universal than that.
So the new Gallery is arranged around recurring ideas instead.
Human Nature. Gifts of Light. Cycles of Life. Tangled Wood. The Age of Trees. The Quiet Cold.
They aren’t intended as rigid classifications. Quite the opposite. They’re simply different ways into the work—themes that have emerged naturally over many years of photographing trees and woodland, while leaving plenty of room for interpretation. I hope browsing the photographs this way feels a little more thoughtful and encourages connections between images that might otherwise have remained separate.
The Print Room
The Prints section has had an equally substantial rethink and now has a name of its own: The Print Room.
I’ve always cared enormously about the physical print. A photograph on a screen and a photograph on paper are related things, but they aren’t quite the same experience. The Print Room is intended to give the printed work a little more space and attention: clearer browsing, better ways of finding photographs, more considered presentation, and room views that help give a sense of how a print might live in a home.
There are lots of smaller changes throughout the site too—improvements to navigation, mobile browsing, workshops, books and the general flow from one part of the website to another. Most of them will hopefully go unnoticed, which is probably a good sign. The aim has never been to make people admire the website. It’s to make the website disappear enough for the photography to do the talking.
The return of the Journal
And then there’s this Journal.
Some of you may remember that I used to write a blog. Over time it quietly disappeared, partly because the internet seemed to be moving towards shorter and faster ways of sharing things, and partly because I allowed myself to drift in that direction too.
I’ve increasingly missed having somewhere to write at a slower pace.
So the blog has returned, although Journal feels like a better description of what I want it to become. I don’t intend to fill it simply for the sake of posting regularly. Instead, I’d like it to be somewhere for occasional thoughts from the woods, new photographs, stories behind particular work, printmaking, projects, books and workshops—and probably the odd thing I haven’t thought of yet.
That slower approach is very important to me.
The next part of the same path
Woodland has shaped an enormous part of my life. The woods have given me photographs, certainly, but far more than that: curiosity, refuge, friendship, perspective and countless hours in which simply being there has been enough.
That relationship has deepened over the years, and I wanted this website to reflect it.
And, of course, Meg has been there for all of it. She’s now getting on for thirteen, but age seems to have done remarkably little to dampen her enthusiasm for heading into the woods. She still accompanies me with the same energy, curiosity and humour she always has, and she is woven into so many of the places, photographs and memories that have shaped the past decade. I cherish every moment she’s by my side—or happily entertaining herself by splashing in a woodland stream.
The colours, the pace, the photographs, the language and even some of the smaller details have all been shaped by the same thought: that the way my work is presented should carry something of the feeling I have when I’m among trees.
Not in an overly literal way, and hopefully never at the expense of good design or usability, but with warmth, quietness and respect for the subject at its heart.
Ten years after baxter.photos first appeared, this feels less like starting again and more like reaching the next part of the same path.
I hope you enjoy wandering around.
And, as ever, thank you for being here.
