Ancient Trees by ACC Art Books

Ancient Trees Portraits of Time

Beth Moon

Front cover: Detail of Rilke’s Bayon, 2007. See page 79.

Back cover: Detail of The Sentinels of St. Edwards, 2005. See page 36.

Pages 2–3: Detail of Heart of the Dragon, 2010. See page 56.

Page 6: Detail of Avenue of the Baobabs, 2006. See page 63.

Page 96: Detail of The Ifaty Teapot, 2006. See page 64.

Page 102: Detail of Kings Canyon Sequoias, 2004. See page 42.

Permissions

“Hylidae,” originally published in the New Yorker. Copyright © 1961 by Robert Hillyer, copyright renewed 1989 by Francesca P. Hillyer and Elizabeth V. Hillyer; from Collected Poems by Robert Hillyer. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Random House LLC for permission.

Editor : David Fabricant

Designer : Misha Beletsky

Production manager : Louise Kurtz

Photographs, introduction, and acknowledgments copyright © 2014 Beth Moon. Essay “Adapted to Endure” copyright © 2014 Todd Forrest. Essay “Eternity in Present Tense” copyright © 2014 Steven Brown. All rights reserved under international copyright conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Inquiries should be addressed to Abbeville Press, 137 Varick Street, New York, NY 10013. The text of this book was set in Arno Pro. Printed in China.

First edition

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Moon, Beth.

Ancient trees : portraits of time / Beth Moon ; with essays by Todd Forrest and Steven Brown.

pages cm

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-7892-1195-8 (alk. paper)

1. Trees. 2. Trees—Pictorial works. I. Title.

SD383.M66 2014 582.16022'2—dc23 2014020852

For bulk and premium sales and for text adoption procedures, write to Customer Service Manager, Abbeville Press, 137 Varick Street, New York, NY 10013, or call 1-800-A rtbook .

Visit Abbeville Press online at www.abbeville.com.

Introduction

Beth Moon 7

Adapted to Endure: The Form and Function of Ancient Trees

Todd Forrest 9

Plates

Great Britain 17

United States 42

Israel 54

Socotra 56

Southern Africa 63

Cambodia 76

Captions 80

Eternity in Present Tense: Beth Moon and the Art of the Tree

Steven Brown 97

Acknowledgments 101 Index of Trees 103

Eternity in Present Tense Beth Moon and the Art of the Tree

Steven Brown

But suddenly, mind overwhelmed by sense, You hear eternity in present tense— The tree toads singing in the shallow pond, Singing and dreaming of tall trees beyond —Robert Hillyer, “Hylidae”

Ahandful of collectors, curators, and historians may recall what the first permanent photographs portrayed: Nicéphore Niépce’s rooftop view at La Gras, Daguerre’s atelier with its decapitated cherubs and sober studies of Parisian boulevards. But one of the first truly memorable images is of a tree. William Henry Fox Talbot—Daguerre’s English challenger in the race to preserve nature’s pencil—gave us An Oak Tree in Winter in 1841. And it is a monumental image, strangely coherent in its disarray, unlike Daguerre’s cluttered desk. The trunk’s thick axis siphons the earth upward into increasingly diminished arteries until, at last, they disperse into fine mists of burnt and raw umber. Almost like a Rorschach image, the oak surrenders itself to archetype, to form and shape, to composition, to an ideal. The trouble with ideals, unfortunately, is that they tend to float above us, detached from actual joys and actual sufferings. Neither does Talbot’s oak share its unique selfhood with the viewer. We see it only as Every-tree, something akin to Goethe’s Urpflanze (archetypal plant) or the Chinese pictogram 木, which visually resembles its meaning. Luckily for us, capturing the selfhood of the tree is the distinguishing genius of photographer Beth Moon.

For all its universal appeal, the tree has very few masters in photography. And that’s because 90 percent of the oak’s nobility is in its roots. In other words, trees demand an acute sense of time and a love of history, not just a weakness for golden leaves come mid-October. Gertrude Elizabeth Rogers’s Gnarled Tree (c. 1860) proves the point. Most trees are “gnarled,” but few allude to the prehistoric artistry of a Willendorf Venus as her image does. In 1863, Samuel Bourne photographed the Great Deodar near Shimla, India (deodar, from the Sanskrit devadāru, meaning “wood of the gods”), which remains one of the camera’s finest tributes to the giants that have largely disappeared from this earth. Carleton Watkins’s lone pine overlooking Yosemite Valley in 1866 is a kind of dendromorphic revision of Casper David Friedrich’s famous Traveler Looking over a Sea of Fog (c. 1818).