Photographer Dylan Hausthor’s lyrical visions delve into themes of storytelling, faith, folklore and the inherent queerness of nature. Small-town gossip, relationships to the land, the mysteries of wildlife, the drama of humanity and the unpredictability of human spectacle inspire the stories in these images and installations.What the Rain Might Bring by Dylan Hausthor is published by TBW books

Dylan Hausthor: ‘I’m fascinated by the instability of storytelling and hope to enable character and landscape to act as gossip in their own right: cross-pollinating and synthesising’

Within Hausthor’s untamed world, characters and landscapes become conduits, weaving together new narratives that challenge perceptions of reality

The imagery – an owl mid-flight, a procession of figures, an infant nursing at its mother’s breast, a towering mushroom, spiders in their webs – paints a world where human roles feel fragile, overshadowed by the dominance of nature. Each photograph oscillates between the eerie and enchanting, the humorous and the haunting

Hausthor’s photography integrates elements of ad hoc investigative journalism, disinformation and performance, disrupting traditional approaches to nature photography. The viewer is drawn into a space where the line between truth and artistic licence is deliberately blurred

Dylan Hausthor: ‘I was recently visiting my home town and stopped to fill up my car. I noticed a woman sitting outside the gas station drinking coffee and recognised her as my old ballet teacher. I sat down next to her and we caught up. She had been going blind for a decade since I last saw her. She had fallen out of love, started growing a garden and found God. She had a small collection of freshly picked mushrooms next to her and handed me one, saying “Mushrooms have no gender, did you know that?”’

Cultural systems, communities bound by belief, ruralism, the ghosts that haunt landscapes and the disentangling of colonial narratives are what drive these installations, images and videos

‘Two moths mating, taken as I wait for a tow truck’

‘A strange field of sunflowers, ones that refused to look at the sun. Instead of drinking the sunlight, as most of their species do, this field turned their backs. This image was taken during a time I was working at a sheep farm’

‘There is a time of year where the black ice is worse than ever. For a week or so, it overlaps with the time that spiders are still making webs before going into diapause’

‘An exercise in care and attention that takes place at a Zen Buddhist monastery in which one person leads another around after they’ve dunked their head into mud’

The images evoke a sense of pagan, Wiccan, religious, anarchic and mystic rituals, offering a visual exploration that is at once candid and full of hidden secrets

‘I hope for the viewers and readers of my work to find themselves in a space between fiction and reality – to push past questions of validity that form the base tradition of colonialism in storytelling and folklore and into a much more human sense of reality: faulted, broken and real’

Hausthor’s book is named after David Arora’s famed mushroom identification guide, All That the Rain Promises and More

It can be seen as an exploration of a post-fact world, where the boundaries between parable and reality dissolve, leaving the viewer to question what they believe