Inspired by natural history, mythology, and a primordial view of the natural world as a place alive and enchanted, photographer Jonathan Levitt went looking for the endangered and haunted places – natural landscapes still enlivened by intact habitat and the corresponding wild animals.

The resulting images, made primarily in the Maritime Northeast between Newfoundland and Maine (and around the mangrove islands and hardwood hammocks of the subtropical Southeast), are presented in a sequence meant to evoke elements of animistic art and fossils of classical poetry from oral cultures.

The suggestive title refers to the Echo Transformation mask worn by members of Northwestern tribes during winter enactments of myth. They danced as Echo, the forest dwelling being who mimics animals, birds and other creatures, including human beings.

When I ask Jonathan to tell me more about the editing process, he says “I was interested in approximating structures from ancient mythology and fragments of oral poetry. Also, the non-linear thinking that takes place during journeying.” He did it perfectly. The visual narrative recalls perceptive phenomenon such as synaesthesia, transmogrification and onomatopoeia. Time doesn’t exist while looking at these images. Or at least not in the form we usually know.

Constantly in search of the ever-changing natural phenomena, Jonathan’s intent is “to capture and show some of the sublime strangeness that is easy to experience in wild nature, a feeling common to all intact ecosystems and places remote from human development and extraction”. To do this, he takes pictures but not with a documentary approach—not at all. Echo Mask looks more like a fairy tale, a dream where mystery and unconscious meet, a traditional poem handed down from generation to generation.