Ghost trees — and a song of hope
Finding natural beauty amid the forest destruction wrought by climate change
I’ve been spending a good deal of time lately photographing wounded forests in Oregon — trees damaged or destroyed last year at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest by a late summer fire, and trees knocked to the ground around our home in the woods by January’s powerful ice storm.
Photographing the damage has been at turns challenging, absorbing and emotional. I haven’t had a lot of practice making pictures of burned or wind-damaged trees, so I find myself going back again and again to confront the ravaged landscape, looking for ways to create coherent images out of the chaos. Sometimes the resulting photos are simply not convincing, by which I mean they don’t convey the sense of being there amid the broken or burned trees and limbs. Sometimes technical problems seem overwhelming. How do you photograph charred black trees in a charred black landscape? That’s like photographing the proverbial black cat in a coal mine at night.
But in recent days I find myself finding more and more interesting pictures that emerge as I revisit the same places at different times of the day and in different weather. Here’s a photo I took yesterday in the woods below our house. At first it’s hard to read: What you’re seeing is morning sun on the flat root ball of a large Douglas-fir that has toppled down the hill, directly away from the viewer. And on the reddish clay soil, you see shadows of other trees in the forest, like a line of dancing ghosts.
As I look over the pictures I’ve made in our woods since January, I keep coming back to this image again and again. It seems to evoke everything from archaeological digs to drive-in theater screens, and the setting, between standing trees, gives the photo a temple-like feel.
I’ll be playing with this one — cropping and recropping, then converting to black and white and adding my own colors with a paint brush, as I assemble work for the Fire & Ice show I’m putting together for next year about climate change.
Meanwhile, here’s a bit of optimism. Yesterday morning when I was out photographing broken trees, our lower forest was filled with uproariously beautiful birdsong, courtesy of several tiny Pacific wrens who were loudly staking out their territories for nesting.
At All About Birds, Cornell Lab says this about Pacific wrens: “Their song is a sweet series of tumbling, trilling notes with a staccato quality. Pacific Wrens have a large catalog of complex songs. Males sing for 5 to 10 seconds, stringing together as many as 50 different phrases.”
Less scientifically, I heard it as a song of hope. Here is one of the little operatic singers, perched on a broken tree branch:
This one’s going into Fire & Ice for sure.
Speaking of dark themes in art
By the way, if you love great photography, do check out the new Netflix series Ripley, an eight-parter based on Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley. It’s shot entirely in luscious black and white, reminiscent of film noir, by cinematographer Robert Elswitt.
He and writer/director Steven Zaillian may have gone a little over the top with the visuals, which some people apparently find distracting, but I was fascinated by the melodramatic Caravaggio lighting and the careful composition of each and every shot. The series also captures the mood and darkness of Highsmith’s novel — one of my favorite books — much better than the brighter and lighter 1999 film version starring Matt Damon.