The cottonwood project I’ve embarked on is turning out to have some interesting differences from work I’ve done in the past. Which is a great thing in a project, something that I aim for but can’t predict. This one has has helped me not only to see cottonwoods (and other trees) in a new way, but also to be more aware of genre influences in picturing them. By genre I mean more or less familiar modes or types of photographing, such as landscape or portrait or documentary. Genres are similar in related arts, but painting, for example, has a different history of pictures made, and therefore we view a painted portrait differently than a photographic one.
The portrait genre comes up because cottonwoods here are often loners. Photographing one is altogether different from photographing in a crowded woods. The tree can be a very individual presence. Am I treating it disrespectfully if I don’t step back and show it in full? The image below is the widest I have at this location; somehow I seem to be resisting compositions with so much sky (definitely something to work on there). It’s not that I’m a pan-psychic concerned about the tree’s soul. It’s rather that the solitary setting makes me think about the tree differently, and I become aware that thinking of the photograph as the portrait of a tree tends to lead to different images than thinking of the photograph as a landscape that happens to feature a tree.
This particular veteran deserves not only respect but also pity, for it won’t be long before it goes the way of its immediate family on this seasonal creek (running–when it runs–just behind and to the left). I’ve passed this location almost every day for the last seven years, and at first there was a row of half a dozen or more trees there. They are now only remnant trunks on the ground. They’ve been gradually succumbing to lack of water, which is due partly to natural drought and partly to changes in upstream water usage. In a word, development.
Emphasizing the expected fate of the cottonwood moves the photograph towards documentary. Particularly in photography, there’s a long tradition of images showing environmental destruction, whether thoughtless (like soil loss in the Dust Bowl era) or intentional (like over-logging or suburban expansion). If one starts to see the photograph as falling into this genre, it casts the cottonwood as victim, tending to categorize and trivialize it, while directing ones emotional reaction elsewhere.
How do you see the cottonwood in the pictures here? Does one image seem better or more interesting? What genre feels most natural?
Steve,
I like the second image the best. The grass in the foreground emphasizes the filigree of the tree branches.
The poignancy of the third image are the juxtaposition of the ruined trees and the buildings in the background.
In times of hardship, I found solace in trees. Does it make me pan-psychic?
Steve,
The comparison with portraiture is apt and interesting. I like the first cottonwood best. Cottonwoods are fragile creatures — yet they live in the unfragile drought-ridden west. An interesting combination.
The vertical of the tree, with its tangle of limbs, against the horizontal of the downed wood, with all that detail, catches my attention and holds it.
The last photograph pulls me toward the housing development (?) in the background. While it looks like something of that is also present in the other two, it only jumps at me in the last one.
steve:
Arnold Boecklin comes to mind as your first and second photographs resemble something of his - or so I imagine.
I prefer the second. Maybe there’s more the sense of portraiture, air - a better balance of values.
While the well-taken photograph can encompass a number of intended meanings and emotions, I think that something obverse can also happen in that those qualities can be wrung out by the matter-of-factness of the image. The tree stands in a lightened environment, all gathered aesthetically and a feeling emerges from it, drawn by the reaction of your mentality to a stimulus. But beyond that we see a natural unfolding - a life and death cycle - that for me at least, has little emotional impact. I’m writing this at a wooden desk for goodness sake.
Jay,
No perception of natural unfolding? Does the fact that you write at a wooden desk rather than a plastic desk mean that you appreciate organically grown matter?
June,
Is your preference of the first image rooted in your preference for things large?
Birgit,
That’s an excellent point about the second having more of the grassy patches to play off the tree branches. I think I may be coming around to your preference. I liked the first because of the larger amount of detail visible in the down and standing trees, which may be partly the attraction for June, also.
Jay,
Thank you for your art historical perspective. I read a great deal — or at least looked at a lot of pictures in books — in the distant past, but it’s more fun and enlightening to go into it with a personal stake, seeing what others have done with similar material. Of course, there are limits to how far I can follow Boecklin, even if I wanted to. It’s not obvious here (though the strong atmospheric perspective implies it), but snowflakes are blowing nearly horizontal, so I would have trouble persuading any Diana to traipse lightly clad across the scene.
Birgit:
I do appreciate organically grown matter - especially at lunch time. My point about the desk is that a living oak was chopped down to make it, and the fact hardly matters to me. The entire framework of my local environment is composed of bits and pieces of murdered trees. Like pork or beef it’s all a commodity. It’s only when I see the commodity in terms of its self hood that an empathetic reaction comes up. This disconnect has always bothered me. I guess that I should have been a farmer, or a hunter who respects his prey, so better to mend this broken circle.
Steve:
The deal with Boecklin, who’s work is a marvel of integrated compositional variety, involves one image of a tree in a frozen landscape. I couldn’t google it up. Can you book a Diana in Bozeman? The university must have a dance program.
I will check as the culprit may be somebody with a name like Leuze.
Steve:
Maybe Leutze, The washington crossing the delaware guy. Something in Germanic snow depiction that rings a bell.
Haven’t mentioned the last image which I find carries best. The line of construction in the distance contrasts to the foreground rack in a number of ways - all of them good. To an extent it reminds me of Birgit’s superimposition.