End frame: Cromarty Firth, July 2024 by Marianthi Lainas

Anna Morgan

Anna is a nature photographer and writer who relocated to British Columbia from the UK and is best known for her images of smaller scenes and intimate landscapes. Anna worked as a veterinarian for a number of years before completing a Masters in Conservation Medicine where her research brought photography and conservation together to examine the role of the conservation photographer.

annamorgan.ca

My first job after graduating from Liverpool Veterinary School was in West Kirby on the Wirral peninsula, just a few miles north of the University’s Leahurst campus where I had studied.

Over the four years that I lived in the area I regularly explored local walking paths and enjoyed spending time along the coast. I thought I knew these locations well until I came across Marianthi’s work some years later after I had returned to the South of England. I realised then that I had barely scratched the surface of coming to know the place, the landscapes of the miles-wide Dee Estuary with its mudflats, saltmarshes, sandflats, dunes and intertidal habitats. Marianthi’s main body of work includes many unique, expressive interpretations of the littoral landscape from the mouth of the Dee estuary, and deeply embodies the dynamic nature of an ecosystem in constant flux.

The image I have chosen for this end frame was made by Marianthi in collaboration with another estuarine habitat, the Cromarty Firth, whose principal river’s headwaters lie in the Scottish Highlands. This multilayered cyanotype image has been exposed twice. With each exposure, sand, salt and seaweed get dragged across the paper at the whim of the natural movement of waves, and the photosensitive paper becomes physically imprinted with their marks. The first exposure was co-created by an incoming nocturnal tide in the Firth, and the second, where Marianthi mixed the cyanotype solution with gold pigment ink, by an outgoing morning tide at the same location.