This series is titled, quite simply, ‘Spring.’ Each year around mid-April, I go shooting for no other reason than that it brings me joy to be outside.

I have a short window of time to make these pictures. Spring comes suddenly, and leaves quickly. The best time to go is when I can still see branches - when the leaves, if they are not still buds, are tiny, and light green - and while flowering plants are still in bloom. But that period is very brief. Sometimes just two weeks after the first signs of spring, the woods transition to a uniform green and stay that way all summer.

My location is Winding River Park, a small neighborhood park on the west bank of the Toms River. It’s one of the few places in the local Pine Barrens region where deciduous trees predominate. Normally, low-lying swamps are dominated by dense stands of tall, straight Atlantic white cedar. My own guess is that the cedars were harvested for construction hundreds of years ago when Toms River was still an active seaport, but I’ve never been able to verify that. It could equally make sense that it is an old growth forest, because deciduous trees, being faster-growing, eventually crowd out slower-growing evergreen trees. A biologist will have to make the final ruling.

Winding River Park is a little less than a mile downstream from a notorious Superfund site, the former Ceiba-Geigy chemical plant, which closed in 1996 after allegedly causing a local cancer cluster (the subject of a book for which the director Danny DeVito has purchased movie rights). The Toms River at this location has a different look and feel than other nearby waterways. The water is darker and murkier, and there is less vegetation in the shallows. Still, though, the banks are leafy and serene, with sprawling red maple trees and lush green sedge grasses. It's a pleasant place to shoot.

While the Ceiba-Geigy scandal is peripheral to my conception of this project, its repercussions have an outsized effect on my experience as a photographer. Not only does it affect the local ecosystem and my subjective perception of it,  but it limits my access to the woods. The old factory’s sprawling grounds, located directly across the street from one of Winding River Park’s entrances, are completely surrounded by electrical fencing. Soon, though, the property is set to transition to a nature preserve - hopefully expanding the areas I can photograph in the coming years. And hopefully it will cease being a hulking and sinister presence, but will, like the spring, bring forth feelings of hope, renewal, and regeneration.