Liza Faktor. From the ‘After Us’ series, Logged Ancient Forest, Detroit Lake, Oregon, 2021. Photography. (Courtesy: Lisa Faktor).

After us, the flood. Or maybe not. One of the broader descriptions of art can be something that has no direct use, but affects you indirectly in a big way. That is how science, art, or social art is made possible. The latest ecology-centered photography project by Liza Faktor (b. 1975, Moscow, lives in Portland, Oregon), ‘After Us’, is angst- and hope-driven, and could be partially described as healing art. It is dedicated to the temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest coast, and their man-driven extinction. Mature and old-grown, they play a vital role in mitigating climate change due to their ability to absorb and store carbon (no short-lived wood plantations or new forests are strong enough to fight natural disturbances). The forests are being logged at an advancing speed, driven by human inequality, greed, and short-sightedness, which leads to the extinction of hundreds of species. Eventually, nature hits back with global warming and wildfires.

Liza Faktor. From the ‘After Us’ series, Burnt Tree Stump, Yacolt Burn State Forest, Washington, 2023. Photography. (Courtesy: tLisa Faktor).

The artist’s own fascination with the forests commenced after major health issues back in 2020. She started to go to the woods, later taking the camera with her, which had a therapeutic effect. She comments: “The inquiry was born from my own need for healing … In the past five years, I spent a lot of time in hospitals, and sometimes I haven’t been outside or breathed uncirculated fresh air for weeks. You acquire a new hyper awareness of the living world, the sounds, colors, and movements we take for granted.

There’s only a fraction of ancient forests left in the world, but as unthinkable as it sounds, we are still logging them in the US <…>

Only a very hard soul can stay immune to the abundance that ancient forest offers you, your brain chemistry changes in minutes. Every person living in the proximity of the grand forest has a story about an owl, or a hundred-year-old tree.”

Liza Faktor. From the ‘After Us’ series, Aftermath of the Wildfire, Yacolt Burn State Forest, Washington, 2023. Photography. (Courtesy: Lisa Faktor).

Liza Faktor has been working with photography since the 90s. It was a pointedly DIY era in her home city – creativity was booming, fueled by a huge interest in everything new and unknown, but there were about zero institutions that would serve as communication channels with the audience. You had to build infrastructure from scratch. In such a way, all the art galleries of the time have emerged, funded privately, selling only seldomly, but playing the role of contemporary art museums (then yet absent) and financing major shows of local and international artists. Same with awards and fairs. This is not a practice unheard of – the same applies to most situations of drastic cultural and economic upheaval, followed by changes in artistic practices.

Liza Faktor. From the ‘After Us’ series, Empty Bullet Shells from Target Shooting, Yacolt Burn State Forest, Washington, 2023. (Courtesy: Lisa Faktor).

A good example is that of Konrad Fischer (known artistically as Konrad Lueg, 1939-1996), who studied together with Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke at the Dusseldorf Art Academy under Joseph Beuys in the 60s. He stepped down as an artist and created the Konrad Fischer gallery in 1967 specifically to show the new works of his friends and colleagues, as well as to bring the best examples of the art of the time from the US. Only in the last years of his life were his paintings shown again, gaining him eventually a decent amount of fame. The gallery exists still, it’s a landmark 5-story old plant in central Berlin, hosting shows of the same artists sometimes, now well-established, and participating in art fairs.

Liza Faktor. From the ‘After Us’ series, Forest Rebirth After the Wildfire, Mt. Hood National Forest, Oregon, 2023. Photography. (Courtesy: Lisa Faktor).

In such a way, Lucian Perkins and Bill Swersey, two American documentary photographers, started InterFoto in 1994, a US-Russian non-profit initiative that has grown to become a yearly photography festival, the largest in the region. It existed for 10 years and has shown many outstanding Western authors in Russia (Anthony Suau, Martin Parr, Joseph Koudelka, to name just a few) and has introduced Russian photographers to the world (Ljalja Kuznetsova and Vladimir Syomin, among the others). Liza Faktor became part of this project somewhere around 1996. She’s also been exhibiting her own works since 2003 and has a list of awards in her CV, the first one being the Howard Chapnick Grant from W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund in 2002. All the time, she was building different structures that would bring like-minded creative people together. This included starting the Objective Reality Foundation in 2001, a non-profit that has originated or supported numerous photography projects for over a decade, including the internet magazine Photographer.ru. This collaboration gave birth to Agency. Photographer.ru in 2005 and Gallery.Photographer.ru in 2007 (later renamed Grinberg agency and gallery).

Liza Faktor. From the ‘After Us’ series, Protected Temperate Coastal Rainforest, Oswald West State Park, Cape Falcon, Oregon, 2021. Photography. (Courtesy: Lisa Faktor).

In the 2000s, Liza became a prominent representative of a very loose group of photographers that may be styled as Russian deadpan. Most of them have previously worked with the above-mentioned agency, gallery, or foundation, or just appeared to be close aesthetically. In 2018, a summary exhibition called New Landscape was put together, first shown in the Yeltsin Center in Ekaterinburg, then in Moscow’s Ekaterina Foundation (2019), and proceeded to tour in Norway (2020) and other locations. Curated by Anastasia Tsayder (b. 1983) and Petr Antonov (b. 1977), participants themselves, it included, apart from Faktor, works by Alexander Gronsky (b. 1980), Valery Nistratov (b. 1973), Sergey Novikov (b. 1979), Max Sher (b. 1975). The exhibition provided a reference to the famous exhibition New Topographics, but also showed an effort to summarize earlier projects that were centered on criticizing the observable economic and political situation through the landscape medium.

Liza Faktor. From the ‘Surface of Siberia’ series, Ice breaking, Dudinka, 2001. Photography. (Courtesy: Lisa Faktor).

Liza’s own creative agenda has always been intertwined with working with other artists as a curator and arts producer. She says sometimes she can hardly separate these practices, especially in the context of forest investigation: everybody is feeding everyone, all the time. Her newest collaborative initiative is called ‘Roots: Curatorial Inquiry Into Forest Ecosystems’. It is a program bringing together about two dozen artists from around the world, working in a variety of media that can exist in a variety of formats: exhibitions (photography, video & sound installations, immersive experiences), artists’ films and documentary screenings, artist talks, and panels including US and international artists, writers, scientists and Indigenous culture bearers as guests.

Liza Faktor. From the ‘After Us’ series, Pacific Ocean, Lincoln City, Oregon, 2023. Photography. (Courtesy: Lisa Faktor).

Seeing the ancient forests as temples, Liza steps forward with one more cooperation proposal: “While at the art residency at Sitka Center for Art and Ecology (2023) situated in a protected coastal natural reserve, Cascade Head and the Salmon River Estuary, I thought about producing a dedicated healing chapel, ideally installed as a permanent artwork in a hospital. It is supposed to be a place for immersion in the temperate rainforest for those who can’t engage with nature physically, a place for relieving anxiety, stress, worry about a loved one—for patients, medical workers and visitors alike, and above all, for reflection on the fate of species disappearing because of us, on the state of our bodies and on human condition. At least we are not on a path to extinction, yet.”