Treading softly on Tom Hoyle's leafy dreams

Photographer Tom Hoyle has been photographing leaves in his laundry and working ropes and pullies for aerial dancers in a Commonwealth Games Festival show on Australia's Gold Coast. But Tom's day job is producing alpine-related publications, where he's made a name for himself with his landscape photographs. What made him shift his focus from mountains to individual leaves was a collaborative exhibition with choreographer Sacha Copland called Tread Softly. In it, performers dance amongst fallen leaves in a gallery, surrounded by Tom's leaf images, and its about to open at Wellington's Toi Poneke Gallery on the 6th of April. With such a wide range of work, Lynn Freeman started by asking why Tom Hoyle describes himself as "a photographic expeditionary".