A year's worth of the life of a tree.

July 29, 2013 6:57 PM

Mark Hirsch worked as a professional photographer for almost 20 years. He was laid off, then he was hit by a truck. He all but stopped working, until he got an iPhone. His friend goaded him into using the camera, and he started taking pictures of "That Tree." A little more than a year later he was profiled in "How a tree helped heal me."
posted by nevercalm (13 comments total)

I'm no critic, but as far as I'm concerned: Absolutely lovely. This is what cameras are for!
posted by TreeRooster at 7:09 PM on July 29, 2013

This is a very sad, but eerily relevant song - I Remember Me - The Silver Jews.
posted by chambers at 7:11 PM on July 29, 2013

This is fantastic. I've always thought that incredible constraints are a good way to push yourself into making something great.

Word of warning to people scrolling through the archives- the next button is slightly broken in places and likes to jump around or skip over photos...
posted by showbiz_liz at 7:30 PM on July 29, 2013

This is good photography.
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:32 PM on July 29, 2013

I like this a lot.
posted by rtha at 7:53 PM on July 29, 2013

Really beautiful photos - creative and high quality, and he represents the personality of the tree in so many ways. Thanks for posting - such an impressive effort, and a great story too.
posted by j810c at 7:57 PM on July 29, 2013

I love this. He and I apparently live in similar landscapes, and a bur oak in the middle of a field (they're always lonely, that's their ecological niche!) is so homey and beautiful to me.

He talks about how he was forced by his accident and by this project to slow down and start noticing the tree in real detail. I've found that one of the most interesting parts of having a toddler is that, since they move at the speed of slow, you spend a lot of time contemplating the world around you while waiting for them to walk 8 feet or pick up a dropped mitten. I started paying attention to the birds zipping around at all seasons while following my toddler's slow meanders, and gradually got hooked enough to get field guides and binoculars and start a life list. Other people become architecture buffs while walking their dogs or experts on river barges looking out the window at a boring job.

I'm starting to look forward to "boring" activities where I can just sit and watch the world, and I'm avoiding using my iPod to entertain myself. There's more to see than I realized.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:12 PM on July 29, 2013 [6 favorites]

Ten years ago I was engaged in a year-long project (no, I wasn't looking for a book deal) where every morning before I left for work I walked to a park two blocks from my house and photographed the same tree from the same spot. I was thinking partly of John Ruskin and his teaching labourers to sketch -- not because he wanted them to be artists but because he realized that of you looked at a tree for long enough to sketch it, you see it very differently -- and partly of Harvey Keitel's character in Smoke, photographing the same Brooklyn corner every morning for years.

Sure enough, I learned a lot. The park was at the top of a bluff and my house at the bottom of it, so the icy stairs early in the year were difficult to negotiate and lent the thing an aspect of a cartoon climb to the mountaintop to gain enlightenment. I was startled looking back later at the photos at how swiftly spring had come: On March 17, the first bare ground was visible beneath the snow, and by March 21, there was no snow to be seen (and I was bemused to find that I had been photographing part of a basketball court all winter, as the court surface only revealed itself in March). Visible in the distance was a house on the street delineating the far side of the park: for months I assumed that I was seeing a flag hanging above their garage door, but slowly it dawned on me that I was actually seeing a kite caught in a far tree.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 8:25 PM on July 29, 2013 [4 favorites]

Photography is not a strength of mine, but when I've lived places where I can get around on foot, I've tried to walk different routes every day. Helped me find a lot of magical little spots in Taibei, for example, when I was living there. This project has a lot of the same appeal.
posted by jiawen at 9:13 PM on July 29, 2013

Beautiful work. Special trees are, in some ways, like dogs. They are always there to give you solace without asking for anything in return.
posted by Kerasia at 9:59 PM on July 29, 2013

nevercalm: "He was laid off, then he was hit by a truck. He all but stopped working, until he got an iPhone."

The man who couldn't cry?
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 11:08 PM on July 29, 2013 [1 favorite]

This is just lovely. When I was studying photography, we had an assignment to photograph something from five different angles. I chose a huge tree stump that I'd walked past day after day but never properly looked at. I sat on top of it, got eye level with it, looked at it from afar. I contemplated its life and wondered how far it used to reach into the sky and what birds used to land in its branches. Although it was dead, it was very beautiful and it came alive to me. During those two days of being with it and taking deliberate and considered photos, I learned to slow down and really see something instead of just quickly snapping a few shots and moving on. It was an amazing experience and it changed me as a person - and of course as a photographer.

And now I look at Mark's photos and I realise: now that's really seeing.
posted by {quick brown fox} at 3:29 AM on July 30, 2013

One thing I loved about Hirsch's project is that he didn't do the same shot every day. I'm sure while he was there he probably took pretty much the same shot every day, but when he edited, he gave us an entire picture of the tree, from what it looks like from hundreds of feet away to what's living in or hammered into the bark, to what's happening in the branches. It's as complete a portrait and story of a thing that I've ever seen.
posted by nevercalm at 4:57 AM on July 30, 2013