Meditative Ghost Trees by Ellen Jantzen

There are photographs that document the world, and then there are photographs that haunt it. Ellen Jantzen’s ghost tree series falls firmly into the latter category — a body of work that blurs the line between nature photography and fine art, between the physical and the spectral.

Jantzen, a St. Louis-based artist, created her “Disturbing the Spirits” series by layering exposures, manipulating light, and embracing the uncanny qualities that emerge when the camera lingers in low light among bare winter trees. The results are images that feel simultaneously ancient and futuristic, grounded in the real landscape yet hovering just outside of it.

What makes the work so arresting is its restraint. There are no heavy-handed digital effects, no composite skies or impossible colors. The ghostly quality comes from careful observation and technical craft — from understanding how film and sensor respond to darkness and motion, and using that knowledge to reveal something that’s always been present in the forest but rarely seen.

The trees themselves are the subjects: their bark luminous, their branches reaching like fingers, their bare forms suggesting a kind of skeletal elegance that’s deeply unsettling and deeply beautiful at once. Jantzen photographs them in winter, when the canopy is stripped away and the essential architecture of the tree is laid bare.

We first shared Ellen’s work back in 2013, and it has stayed with us ever since. In an era of visual noise and algorithmic imagery, there is something profoundly refreshing about art that asks you to slow down, look carefully, and sit with what you don’t quite understand.

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