About the series

 

In this series, which is featured in my first book The Music of Trees, I build up densely-layered textures by taking multiple photographs of bare trees in winter from several different angles, and combining them together in-camera — just as experiences and memories are combined together in our minds over time through complex webs of repetition and reinterpretation. I strive to show not the physical exterior of the trees, but an experience of the trees, a mixture of external and internal reality, as if from a secret, misty forest that lies partway between this world and another.

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I have been drawn to trees ever since I was a child growing up in Michigan, next to a forest that I loved to explore. It was a mysterious, magical place where trees towered overhead, gently singing their quiet, rustling duet with the wind. 

 

There is something especially beautiful about bare trees in winter, when trees are stripped down to their innermost essence. They are not dead, just dormant, as can sometimes happen to us when we go through a period of challenges or we hit a creative desert. When the time is right, we and the trees will burst forth again into full vitality, but in the meantime we can celebrate the season of rest and recuperation, and the beauty of trees’ innermost nature laid bare.

 

Since my digital Hasselblad camera does not have the built-in ability to capture multiple exposures, I had to create my own method by leaving the shutter open for a long time and manually uncovering the lens for each exposure. Since I'm never sure quite what the result will be, the process is full of surprises and serendipity, just like the process of forming and finding memories. 

 

All photographs are archival pigment prints, on the highly-textured Hahnemuehle William Turner paper, and are available at 20” x 20”, 40” x 40”, and 58” x 58”.