Melinda Hurst Frye, a Kenmore-based photographer, has developed an unconventional approach to documenting forest ecosystems by taking flatbed scanners directly into the woods. Instead of carrying traditional hiking gear, Frye packs laptops, USB cords, backup batteries, Windex, paintbrushes, and chopsticks alongside her essential tool: vintage 1990s flatbed scanners that she uses to create high-resolution scans of stumps, soil, nurse logs, and mycelium networks.
The artist removes the lids from her scanners before heading into Pacific Northwest forests, allowing her to press the glass plates directly against the earth to capture what she calls the "wood wide web" - the intricate underground networks that sustain forest life. "They're not meant for this," Frye explains about her scanners, which regularly encounter spores and outdoor conditions they were never designed to handle. "They're not supposed to have spores on them, and they're definitely not supposed to go outside."
Frye's artistic journey began with a simple moment in her garden when her young children spotted a beetle moving through the dirt. While the children quickly lost interest when the beetle disappeared beneath strawberry plants, Frye experienced what she describes as a pivotal epiphany. "I started thinking about the ecology of my front yard very differently - like, there's something else here, something underneath, and what does that look like?" she recalls.
As a fine-art photographer with ecological interests, Frye had observed scanners being used for botanical documentation in the early 2000s, but she wanted to push the technology in a more experimental direction. Her first major attempt in 2016, titled "Under the Carrots," revealed orange roots, sprouted seedlings, and worms curving through soil in stunning cross-section detail that traditional cameras couldn't capture.
Frye employs her scanner technique in two distinct ways: studio compositions and field work. In her home studio, she arranges forest specimens like small mushrooms, cedar starts, moss, and emerging flora on scanner glass like carefully crafted bouquets. Sometimes operating five scanners simultaneously, her workspace hums and clicks as the machines create what she describes as having "a sort of weird perspective and light" that renders everything outside the shallow depth of field as pitch black.
Her recent series "Quiet Fruit" showcases this theatrical quality, with pine cones, mushroom stems, and lichen appearing hyperreal against dark backgrounds. Some images feature ghostly white wisps created when mushrooms release spores during the long scanning process. "The spores release and settle back onto the glass," Frye explains. "A regular camera can't give me that, right?" This unauthorized use of office equipment captures forest decomposition and regeneration in real-time.
Born in 1977 and raised in the Pacific Northwest, Frye has deep connections to the region's forests. Her parents built a house in Kenmore at the edge of Saint Edward State Park in the late 1980s, and she spent her childhood exploring the 326-acre wooded expanse she fondly calls "St. Eds." The area provided her with freedom during her teenage years and intimate knowledge of where owls roost and coyotes den in this urban forest setting.
After studying printmaking at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland starting in 1996, Frye moved to Georgia to earn her MFA in photography from Savannah College of Art and Design. She returned to Seattle in 2007 and has taught photography at various institutions including The Art Institute, Photographic Center Northwest, Cornish College, and Seattle University. Following her mother's death from cancer in 2019, Frye moved back into her childhood home in 2020 with her husband and two children, continuing the cyclical nature that characterizes both her life and artistic work.
For her field photography, Frye ventures into nearby Cascade foothills, hiking off-trail to find locations that tell compelling visual stories about forest regeneration. She kneels in the dirt, sometimes using a spade to unearth soil layers and examine what might be growing or moving underneath. Using chopsticks to carefully arrange scenes, she looks for tender roots, tiny flowers, and small creatures that hint at natural cycles and forest renewal.
Her process requires holding heavy scanners perfectly still against uneven surfaces like tree stumps for several minutes at a time, creating what she describes as "a serious arm workout." The goal is to find visual scenes that reveal how the systems of vast landscapes are evident in smaller vignettes, requiring her to clean scanner glass, connect surge protectors to batteries, and hope for the right angle to capture each shot.
Frye's newest series, "Regeneration," documents her regular visits to Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest near Skykomish, where she monitors forest recovery following the Bolt Creek Fire that burned nearly 15,000 acres in 2022. These trips represent another homecoming, as her parents frequently hiked Cascade Range trails during her youth. "I get to see how it regrows, how it's recovering," she says of her seasonal documentation. "Sometimes it's the invasives, sometimes it's cedar starts, but every time it's in a different stage."
Despite her slow, cumbersome, and messy process, Frye's results in series like "The Forest Floor" produce delicate images of ferns unfolding and fungi pushing through soil to kickstart woodland understory growth. "The surface is not a border, but an entrance," she reflects, recalling that transformative moment with the beetle. Through her innovative use of obsolete office technology, Frye hopes to reveal the vast networks operating beneath our feet that continuously regenerate the natural landscape above, making visible the hidden connections that sustain Pacific Northwest forests.
