 |
| Myoung Ho Lee, from a gallery at NYTimes |
Perhaps the most amazing work is that of Korean photographer Myoung Ho Lee, who has completed an elaborate series of portraits based on the installation of a white sheet behind his arboreal subjects. His images convey an urgency to look deeply at the natural world. Here is a chance, he seems to say, to really see a tree. His work addresses one of the problems mentioned in yesterday's review, that of separating the subject from the background, of foregrounding any particular tree (which typically resides in close proximity to others of its kind). I haven't found a book of Lee's work, but a 2008 article in Foam magazine is available online at Issu. A smaller article with a full-screen gallery can be found at the New York Times.
James Balog is an internationally recognized nature photographer whose 2004 Tree: A New Vision of the American Forest seems a bit off. I have only reviewed images available online and haven't yet inspected the book, so I may be missing an important perspective. Like Lee, his work is conceptual, but he takes two seemingly uncomplimentary tacks. One is composting sometimes hundreds of images of one tree, the other draping them with sheer white sheets. This work can be sampled on the photographer's website here.
Just months apart in 2013, two NY-based photographers released book projects focusing on trees in New York City. One worked in black and white, the other in color. Both took a realist, documentary approach to highlighting what many urban dwellers often never take time to appreciate, the beautiful outgrowths of life that take some of the bleakness out of brick, concrete and asphalt. Both books are now on order. A NYTimes article on Mitch Epstein's monochrome work features a full-screen gallery, while a Gardenista article on Benjamin Swett's color photographs includes a sampling of images.
#
No comments:
Post a Comment