The imagined female scientists, explorers and adventurers seen in Tonje Bøe Birkeland’s photographs are echoes from a footnote in women’s history. In her ongoing series, , the photographer frames herself in the guise of Victorian and early-20th century pioneers – dressed in period costume, holding binoculars and bellows cameras – snapped in widescreen vistas of mountains, fjords and ice flows. Each picture is a performance.

The project began in 2008, when Birkeland was on a course about photography’s role in shaping historical truths. “It was all about did Neil Armstrong go to the moon? Did Roald Amundsen actually get to the Pole first?” she recalls. “That made me want to do something about women.” Her first character was a glaciologist.

Her photographs are puzzles and her work taps into the names, appearances and biographies of real, unrecognised women, such as , a polar scientist who traversed the north-east coast of Greenland in the 1920s. As well as stepping into the boots of her creations, Birkeland writes their journals and creates installations of their travel cases (packed with maps and geological samples), which she both photographs and exhibits. She has immortalised her intrepid alter egos in various settings, from the snowdrifts of Svalbard to the foothills of Bhutan.

In the top photo, she is seen as desert traveller Tuva Tengel on a camel in Mongolia. The three other photos show her as Arctic explorer Anna Aurora Astrup in Greenland.

Birkeland’s work will be at in Helsinki, Finland, from 22 August to 19 September.

“Like so many before me, I went into the woods in search of adventure,” writes Anna Beeke, the photographer whose Sylvania series investigates the eerie, cinematic ambience of US woodlands in places such as Washington state. She captures woodcutters who might have stepped out of a painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the rib-like ruins of a felled trunk, and gothic ferns thriving amid dense growths of red cedar and western hemlock. Her title hints at the myriad fables of shadowy or enchanted forests. “They have always been places where humans have ventured beyond the structured limits of civilisation,” she says.

In this image, Beeke delivers a cross-section of nature at work, featuring the Tree of Life, a huge spruce that has become a landmark at Kalaloch on the Pacific shoreline in Washington state. Unfeasibly, its roots span two banks of a cliff. The photo is a fairy-tale composition of muted organic hues punctuated by bright pops of humanity as two children explore the edges of the bluff.

Beeke’s series is featured in by Sophie Howarth, a survey of 26 artists’ work capturing arboreal treasures in Iceland, Germany, Brazil, Australia and more. “Inspired by science, folklore and mythology, these photographers lure us away from the pressures of modern life, back into a timeless world where nature envelops and absorbs us,” writes Howarth in her introduction. The children in Beeke’s shot, winding their way through the strange, coastal canopy, certainly seem absorbed and enveloped. Happily so.