Mike Eggert is an American, Nebraska-based artist who uses both analog and digital photography to capture daily life, landscapes, and nature, generally omitting any human subjects.

In his dedicated black-and-white portfolio, he largely features unaltered works devoid of editing, focusing more on documenting moments and locations than showcasing them in a stylized way, showing things as they are, not as one would interpret them. “I took these photographs because this is what things looked like,” Eggert simply states. “Trees, birds, sky. Nothing dramatic happening, at least not in the usual sense.”

The photographer approaches natural habitats, such as the forests or the suburbs, with a childlike curiosity and an innate desire to explore. He takes the reality he lives in at face value, although there are instances where the artist attributes personifying elements to the birds or the trees. As he notes, “A tree is a tree, birds are birds, and the sky is just there. But I kept looking at them because they made more sense to me than people usually do. They were standing there after weather, damage, age, and whatever else. Not healed. Not ruined either. Just still there.”

In Eggert’s vision, nature, and, by extension, life, are simple and self-explanatory. There is not much room for control, so one might as well not try. The works do not represent the surrender of a photographer who gave up trying to achieve a certain outcome but rather the conscious effort of a non-invasive witness who deeply relates to his surroundings. “I like photographs that do not explain themselves too much. Ordinary things can become strange. A tree can look like a thing just trying to remain upright. Branches can look like nerves, or cracks, or a bad drawing. Some trees look tired.”

He concludes that these are honest “photographs of things that remain, things that weathered something, things that did not ask to mean anything but somehow did. These are photos of trees. And birds.”