California Oaks | 2011-2012
When I first became interested in shooting the oaks trees of California, I did what I naturally do: I researched my subject. I learned all the types of oak trees. I learned about Sudden Oak Death and the gold-spotted wood borer. One day, I came across an article entitled “The Importance of Tree Death.” The premise of the article was that the death of large old oak trees is a necessary part of the natural cycle—death is needed for life. The author detailed how introduced pathogens, rather than those which are part of an ecosystem’s natural mix, can catastrophically alter this cycle. Such is the case with the Sudden Oak Death pathogen—Phytophthora ramorum—and the gold-spotted wood borer. Both were introduced and both are important to tree death, but in new and different ways.
I have spent hundreds of hours in the field photographing most of the oak varieties in California. They are increasingly in peril. Thirty percent of the coast live oaks have perished already. Gold-spotted oak borers have killed more than 80,000 oak trees in San Diego County over the past decade, the biggest oak mortality event since the Pleistocene. Tanoaks are dying en masse; as many as five trees a year fall around our family home in the Santa Cruz mountains. Walking up nearby Bud’s Creek, I can count more than a dozen dead trees just in one camera frame.
And so I have been taking photographs of these trees: of living trees, dying trees, fields and hollows filled with tree carcasses. I am making these images with unflinching hyper-realism, full of color, texture and saturation, because there is another importance to tree death: it is a visual, visceral reminder that our world is out of balance and it is our collective feet that is pressing down on the scale.
