Mpumalanga Forestry was my final academia thesis. Tasked with the topic of Deconstruction / Reconstruction, this collection explores the cyclical nature of the forestry industry though the eyes of a documentary photographer. The assignment lead me to Mpumalanga, South Africa’s biggest timber province, where I travelled from site to site for two weeks understanding the industry and why this trade is so important for our agri-sector.
Forestry starts at the grow house, where pine and gum saplings are germinated in humid greenhouses. This is the first stage of the trees life and the forestry cycle.
At maturity the trees are felled. This is either done by hand by a forestry team, or mechanically by a logging machine. Logs are then either carried out the plantation by staff or timber hitch, and stacked along the road where they’ll be loaded onto a truck.
The logs are then transported to the sawmill, where they will be processed into products with economic value. The mills I visited turned the raw product into pallets and staves for construction.
