[ Lost in the Landscape ]

one way to photograph a tree

Pho­tograph­ing a tree can present some chal­lenges. You can walk around it to select the best angle, or pick a time of day with the best light­ing con­di­tions, but you still have to deal with the fact that the tree stays rooted in its spot and that the back­ground behind the tree may be an unsightly or incom­pre­hen­si­ble mess.

Myoung-Ho Lee. Tree #8, archival InkJet print. [ source ]

Last year I ran across the work of Korean pho­tog­ra­pher Myoung-Ho Lee, whose pho­tos of trees present an elegant–and spec­tac­u­larly not prac­ti­cal–solu­tion to this prob­lem of back­ground. He just brings a plain back­ground with him and stands it up behind the tree. If you fig­ure that the trees in the pho­tos are at least 25 feet tall, you get a sense of how huge the back­ground sheet has to be.

Myoung-Ho Lee. Tree #13, archival InkJet print. [ source ]

Some of the pho­tos have just the tree iso­lated against the plain back­ground. Oth­ers show the tree and back­ground in the larger con­text of the land­scape where the tree is growing.

The results are pretty amaz­ing, and cre­ate pho­tos that are rich with sug­ges­tion and ideas about photography.

Myoung-Ho Lee. Tree #11, archival InkJet print. [ source ]

You might be dri­ven to think about the fact that to pho­to­graph some­thing in the wilds is to select it. Although this act of select­ing the tree isn’t really dig­ging the thing up from nature, it’s still bring­ing some­thing from the wilds indoors onto a wall. That might make you think that photography–and much of art–is find­ing some­thing inter­est­ing inter­est­ing in the world and bring­ing it into a gallery.

You also might think that look­ing at a pho­to­graph of some­thing might tell you some­thing about how the thing in the photo looks, but very lit­tle about its con­text or meaning.

And you might even think of Mar­cel Duchamp dis­play­ing a signed uri­nal in an exhi­bi­tion, with the basic premise that if an artist calls some­thing art, it’s art.

Myoung-Ho Lee. Tree #12, archival InkJet print. [ source ]

None of those thoughts are “right answers,” and you will prob­a­bly have other thoughts of your own. I think you’ll agree, how­ever, that these are some of the more strik­ing pho­tographs of trees that have ever been taken.

July 07 2009 | Categories: art • gardening • photography | Tags: Myoung-Ho Lee • trees | 12 Comments »