Light Reading

I’m re-starting a newsletter (last sent in 2015!) to share new work, thoughts about process, and updates about prints or shows. If you’re receiving this, it’s because you’ve expressed interest in my photography at some point. Thank you for that. I will endeavor to keep it interesting, occasional, and brief.

For the past few years, I’ve been working on a series that looks at trees as language - deconstructed, rearranged, and reconsidered. I’m trying to explore different kinds of seeing and understanding. More complex. Maybe a little weird - good weird.

I began with the Beech tree. You can see the images in that chapter here.

Next up was the mighty Eastern White Pine, the tree that was used almost exclusively to forge a country from the forests of a new world. The chapter is recently complete, and you can see the images here.

If you are interested in trees, and books, I recommend A Natural History of Trees by Donald Peattie, as a beautifully written, comprehensive compendium worth owning. Here’s the opening of the chapter on the white pine…

“For three hundred years, till well after the turn of the present century, White Pine was unrivaled as a timber-producing tree. Perhaps no other tree in the world has had so momentous a career. Certainly no other has played so great a role in the life and history of the American people. Fleets were built to its great stands, and railroads bent to them. It created mushroom fortunes, mushroom cities. Earlier it was a torch in the hands of American liberty. Though now it has fallen dramatically from its high estate to a modest place among the other conifers, its saga is a tale worth recalling.”

If you find yourself in Kendall Square in Cambridge sometime over the next month or so, you can see some of my beech trees at the Cambridge Art Association’s Canal Wall here.

That’s Billy, checking out the work.

My next tree will be the paper birch. If you know of any great birch trees, stands, or forests, please get in touch with the location.

Did you know that the white of birch bark is produced by a natural compound called betulin, which reflects the light of the sun in order to protect the tree from overheating?

It’s a very photogenic tree, and should be an interesting chapter. Here are a few bits of raw material I captured recently…

That’s it for now. I hope you and your families have warm and peaceful holidays.

Don’t hesitate to get in touch, if so moved.

“I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.” Henry Thoreau

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