South African artist Daniel Popper has constructed huge sculptures for Morton Arboretum’s latest art instillation “Human+Nature”. Having worked with the Arboretum’s marketing team for over a decade, Jeffrey was contacted to come out and photograph the sculptures over several days.

One of the biggest challenges for this project was capturing the objects without anyone else in the scene. Knowing that these images will be used not only for marketing and social media, but also items like postcards and posters, they needed to be free of people.  This is already a very popular exhibit, and it required some very early mornings to get there before the crowds showed up. One of the west-facing sculptures needed to be photographed later in the day, and it took hours of patient waiting for the right moment.

Jeffrey also had the opportunity to photograph Daniel Popper as he gave a guided walking tour to each of the five sculptures, answering questions and discussing their construction. A couple of these objects are over 25 feet tall and weigh several tons.

This last image is an interesting one, because it was actually taken by Jeffrey’s daughter Maya. It catches the last gleams of the setting sun as it shines through the trees. You will see other images from these photoshoots in Morton Arboretum’s marketing for this exhibit.