Just outside Brussels, an ancient woodland known as the Sonian Forest spans almost 11,000 acres and includes some of the world’s most impressive beech groves. For photographer Frédéric Demeuse, who grew up in Belgium’s capital, it’s a familiar yet perpetually alluring place. “This is where I made my first naturalist observations,” he tells Colossal, spotting squirrels, amphibians, and birds that sparked his childhood fascination.
In dreamy photographs, Demeuse explores increasingly rare, remote pockets of nature in his ongoing series Forgotten Places. He documents these areas to create a visual record of forests and landscapes that require careful preservation, not only for the flora and fauna that reside there but for human health and mental wellness, too. Over the past 200 years, our connection to nature has dwindled by a mind-boggling 60 percent overall, risking what University of Derby professor Miles Richardson calls an “extinction of experience.”
Exploring beautiful environments and communing with green spaces helps Demeuse feel connected to the land he traverses and encourages him to be more intentional about how he approaches relationships and daily life. Focusing on essential and deceptively simple views of trees and plants is a means to “inspire respect for the extraordinary complexity of the living world and remind us to stay humble,” he says.
While Demeuse enjoys returning to familiar locations to see how they organically transform and go through seasonal cycles, he has also explored landscapes in other parts of the world. “There is nothing that reconnects you more to wilderness than contact with a real forest,” he says, especially immersing oneself amid old-growth trees that have witnessed centuries of change, yet seem to exist in a state of timelessness.
No matter the place, the goal is always the same: to connect with the primordial sense of wonder at nature. He says, “The outside world is constantly calling us—you’d have to be crazy to miss that!”
Explore much more on Demeuse’s website and Instagram.
