I’ve been photographing nudes since the summer of 1995. I’ve put a lot of film through the camera since then, trying to capture the nude figure in as beautiful and/or interesting way as I can. Just a year or two into my photographing nudes, I began to ask myself, “How much longer can I go on photographing the same thing the same way?” About ten years later, that question is even louder in my photographic conscience (though I dare say that I’m not the only photographer who’s asked this of him/her self).

So, as I’ve written here before, in an effort to try something different, I’m beginning to experiment more with multiple exposures. This is something I’ve done from time to time over the years, but there was never any consistency to my doing it, no real effort to put together a body of work with this technique.

Here then are three photos that I made of Sarah Ellis while photographing her in Ohio last summer. For some reason the idea of somebody trapped or encased in a tree seems to have a lot of resonance for me. That’s probably because this whole idea was originated by a scene in “The Wizard of Oz,” in which an apple tree with a face in it comes to life. The idea of a face in a tree just intrigued me – and I guess it still does.