Into the Woods: Trees in Photography was a small exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum which opened in late 2017. It contained the work of 40 photographers from throughout the history of photography, some chosen from the V&A archives, others from those of the RPS. Photographers included Crystal Lebas, Abbas Kairostami, Stephen Shore, Alfred Steiglitz, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Mitch Epstein, Paul Strand, Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Edward Steichen, Wolfgang Tilmans, Lee Friedlander, Jean-Eugen-Auguste Atget, Jem Southam, Simone Nieweg, Paul Hart, John Davies, Robert Adams, Ansel Adams, Ingrid Pollard, Paul Hart, Paul Hill and Fay Godwin.

It’s interesting that many of these names have become very familiar to me and influenced my work, although the majority I’d not heard of at the time. The exhibition intended to demonstrate the enduring fascination with and diversity of responses to the tree as aesthetic object and was expanded into a book published in 2019 by Thames & Hudson. 

Despite its impressive roster of names, Into the Woods appears to have been almost entirely overlooked by the critics. This is perhaps due its size, or perhaps that such a theme wasn’t considered worthy of critical attention. As such, only The Times‘s Nancy Durrant took the trouble to do more than provide an enthusiastic gloss over the bare details. Her review focusses on the sensory experience of being amongst this subject, and is appreciative of the formal and technical excellence and diversity of the selection, making no attempt to draw out any kind of political statement from the exhibition. This, to me, is entirely the point: politics are glimpsed – environmentalism via Robert Adams, race via Ingrid Pollard, for example – but the tree remains the focus of the exhibition. It does not use trees to talk about other things. 

I also take pictures of trees. Of course, my work would never appear in such an exhibition because I’m not even a paid photographer, let alone a celebrated one. But I do have my own relationship to trees, my own way of using them. I’m especially interested in the eerie, monstrous shadows trees cast when they’re bare, and the ways these completely alter their environments.

I’ve also been through periods of photographing urban trees at night as they interact with artificial lighting from buildings and street lights.

Neither of these ways of looking at trees was represented in the exhibition, which sometimes was a little too reassuring, and maybe if I got really good at what I did, one would have found a place here. 

Barnes, M. 2019. Into the Woods: Trees in Photography. London: Thames & Hudson.

Durran, N. 2017. Come where you can see the art for the trees. The Times. December 12.