White Oak (Quercus alba)
Trees, Memory and the Art of Forgetting
A photographer's journey into what we choose to remember—and why we must choose to forget
Trees have always been present throughout my life. I climbed and swung from them as a child. I learned about, planted, and grew them with my mum, grandma, and nana. I physically touch them to anchor me in the present, smell them when the season changes, and shelter under them as protection from the elements. I lie under them to dream and read, to escape and imagine what might be. My connection to them spans across time, serving as sites of memory, places to enjoy in the present, and a space to dream of tomorrow. Past, present, and future in one.
Trees are like that. They hold a space like no other being. I don't use the term "being" lightly—there is an essence and a character to trees that we as humans fail to comprehend fully. As Christopher Alexander wrote, "Trees have a very deep and crucial meaning to human beings... The trees people love create special places; places to be in and places to pass through."
When Everything Changed
Two different factors influenced my desire to try something new in my practice. The first was understanding that there has been a tectonic shift in how photography is viewed since the emergence of digital technologies. The second was the unexpected passing of my dad. These events not only raised awareness of the need to change but also enabled the changes to happen.
I've been struggling to find my place in the world of art. My practice was being reshaped and redefined by the transience of the digital age. I now post on Instagram almost daily, allowing photos to be glanced at and flicked through—in stark contrast to the "printed and hung" analogue practice of Ansel Adams, whose romantic trekking through wilderness to locations few have encountered has haunted me since I first saw his works.
I love the landscapes I've created, but I simultaneously wonder if they're pretending to be something they're not. A 3.3m x 2.1m print—my homage to Adams—deserved to be hung, viewed, and adored. But it was also an artefact of the digital age: raw data captured using a digital device, 33 separate data sets imported and stitched together, stored on a computer, then digitally printed. The constructionist nature of this image embodied public concerns about digital authenticity—people believe today's photos are fake and manipulated beyond the bounds of normalcy.
Then dad died.
Mapping Loss Onto Paper
As my dad died, I coped by physically mapping the events onto paper. If Dad were bleeding out, I would soak paper and throw ink at it, allowing the ink to bleed out. If medical staff were treating fluid buildup, I would splash alcohol over ink-soaked paper to create patterns resembling dried-out areas. If Dad were fighting an infection, I would mix alcohol with ink and let the repellent nature of the mix "fight" on paper, adding in rice to mimic white blood cells.
Therapists have noted the healing importance of narrative processes in coping with stressors and making sense of complex situations through storytelling. My narrative involved creating visual works while listening to stories about Dad shared by friends and family. In the month it took for him to pass, he never regained consciousness. During that time, we laughed, cried, and remembered.
I believe the interplay of venting my memories onto paper without having to verbalise them and listening to tales of dad's youthful misadventures allowed me to heal and opened me up to new possibilities. When I returned home from my dad's funeral, I had freed myself of my constrained approach to photography. The purist was dead. I began to edit photos and push previous boundaries. I started taking deliberately out-of-focus images and creating them through intentional camera movement (ICM) as a deliberate process.
This journey led me to opacity image stacking (OIS) and the work of artist Idris Khan.
A New Way of Seeing
Khan's work from the "every" series uses photos of postcards from a Turner exhibition at the Tate—layering them to create haunting, impressionistic images. His work spoke to me because Turner, like Adams and Namatjira, forms part of the lineage of artists that inform my practice. A lineage that explores the shared history of painting and photography, highlighting their mutual influence.
The process involves taking between fifty and a hundred images of an object as you walk around it. The images are imported as layers into Photoshop, and the transparency of each layer is adjusted to be half that of the previous layer, starting at 100% opacity until the top image in the stack is changed, revealing the completed rendition.
About seventy images is an optimal balance for the impressionism I desire. Less and the final image looks stilted; more and the translucent nature becomes too dense, and the subtle memory-like nature is lost.
After several trials, I jumped all in. I quickly had a significant body of work—more than I've ever done on one theme. Currently, there are thirty-six renditions; thirty-three of them I would hang tomorrow: another twelve waiting to be edited and a list of over thirty trees to shoot.
They tell the story of "place." Because trees are not mobile, to thrive, they must know their particular locus on the Earth far better than any wandering animal. The story of a single place and many places. Sites where human perceptions of time—past, present, and future—form a singularity. An intersection of memory, real discovery, and possibility intertwines. A feeling of something glimpsed without fully knowing.
What the Dead Tree Taught Me
There's a dead tree I'd walked past many times during the past five years, often wondering about its story. Despite looking dead, the tree endured. It had not decayed, the groundskeepers had not removed it, and the kids playing soccer near it had not destroyed it. It had survived. It was one of the first trees I photographed in this series.
By moving away from urban street settings and increasing the number of layers, I achieved a more Turner-like effect. I particularly enjoyed how the process recorded the shadow cast by the trunk. Initial responses primarily commented on the impressionist-like qualities, with scattered references to "hive-like" qualities indicative of modern society.
This fed my concerns surrounding the ubiquitousness of digital images and their impact on photographic practices. I began to question: What does it mean to be a landscape photographer in the digital age? What emerged was a body of literature on connectivity, a shift from individuality to hive-mind mentality, the role of digital technologies in disruptions to the fabric of society, and the importance of memory in society.
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger writes: "The role of forgetting and remembering and how these roles are changing... Forgetting plays a central role in human decision-making. It lets us act in time, cognisant of, but not shackled by, past events."
The power to forget—to rewrite ourselves—is an essential aspect of growth and development. It allows us, both as individuals and as a society, to heal. I understood this concept intellectually, but it wasn't until I read Pierre Nora's "Between Memory and History" that disparate elements clicked into place.
The Disruption We're Living Through
I like the results that change through self-reflection brings, but not the process of going through change. My fixation on digital technologies and their effects was not about the changes happening, but that I was caught in the middle of it, having not had a say in being involved.
Nora called the act of "real environments of memory" becoming "sites of memory" a "disruption"...
For example, when the memory contained in the land was lost as people left during the Industrial Revolution. I believe the emergence of our "extended self" in digital spaces disrupts our personal histories, our sites of memory. I am "atom borne" living in a world of "net borne."
I love ideas. I embrace the notion of what photography might become stripped of its blind adherence as a central pivot and function of memory. But it also scares me. It is not unlike how painters must have felt during the emergence of photography.
I have fears about the rate and degree of change, as well as the lack of critical discussion I see happening. I've highlighted the importance of forgetting, but what if we could not forget? Case studies of people with perfect memories show they become paralysed and unable to make decisions. They remember every decision and outcome; they become so literal in their approach that they lose the ability to abstract and think creatively.
Surprise—we live in an age where the internet never forgets. Our pasts are becoming etched like tattoos into our digital skins, affecting our ability ever to forget. Recent analysis of data from the 1970s to 2008 found that although IQ scores have increased, scores on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking have significantly declined.
Digital technologies have remarkable benefits, but also come with a cost that is not acknowledged. That scares me. Those most affected are the least engaged and the least equipped to have such a discussion.
Memory, Names, and Knowing
In naming my tree images, I noticed I had called some botanically—but not all. The difference was how trees are anchored in my memories. I know the botanical names of the trees that Mum, Grandma, and Nana worked on in the garden. Trees with only common names lack that link.
Maybe it was remembering gardening with maternal family members, or remembering the Acer palmatum—Japanese maple I inherited from mum, who had inherited it from grandma, over seventy years old when it died from a beetle infection—but I drifted further down memory lane.
Out of it came a realisation that trees are touchstones for me. They act as places of memory, as places to anchor the senses through touch (especially if I need a timeout to chill), and they serve as places of dreaming. A place where I can let go and drift on the wind through leaves and imagine what might be. They are a place where the past, present, and future exist as one.
Elements of time that exist within our minds in a state of constant flux and form a complex portrait, which changes depending on differences in perspectives and attitude, the vantage point from which events are experienced, the language and culture involved, and the emotional nature of the temporal event.
The Art of Omission
Evolution has turned humans into sharply isolating creatures, seeing the world not only anthropocentrically but also in isolation. Almost all our art before the Impressionists proclaimed our love of clearly defined boundaries, unique identities, and the individual thing released from the confusion of background. But this also raises considerable questions about the limits we impose on what we see.
Several of my images contain the conscious choice of omission—the deliberate aesthetic choice not to circumnavigate the whole tree. My instinct suggested that the pictures would work better if I omitted part of the tree.
The dead tree's solidness draws your eye down to where the tree meets the soil, to where what is known becomes unknown. The roots of a tree are its living heart, with eighty per cent of its activity happening below ground. Trees talk to each other, though just not in a language we humans are yet capable of understanding.
Much happens unseen underneath the surface. We know the roots are there, but we choose not to see. In many ways, we could be like trees. Our bodies are like trees—there is so much going on if we choose to notice. What if I paid more attention to everything beneath my skin?
I may not understand my body and mind as well as I should, but I believe that I have a sense of trees that extends beyond the norms of everyday life. It turns out that a 500-year-old stump in Germany is still alive, being fed and supported by the trees around it.
The choices I make are mine, and I must own them. We must do so with both a greater understanding of what we choose to include and what we choose to omit. This extends beyond artistic practice to how we are in the world, as we are always telling a story.
Moving Forward
During this process, an inherent discord became apparent. I am creating a body of work featuring trees, which will be printed on paper made from trees. If the work is to have integrity, I need to find a way of displaying the ecologically sound work.
Further, I am faced with how to resolve the presentation. Should the work be bound into a handmade book using original materials, so that the completed work has the images as leaves of a book? Do I emboss the photos into a map based on scientists' mapping of tree connections? Or do I map the character I sense in the trees into portraits of people with whom I have similar traits?
These are questions for another day. It is enough that I am aware they need to be addressed. For now, the collection continues to grow and evolve. And I endeavour to keep noticing, recording, and reflecting so that I am prepared for the next "what if?" moment.
What This Means
Through reflective practice, I've come to believe I am an artist who "attempts to understand another life world using the self—or as much of it as possible—as the instrument of knowing." This process has led me to a greater understanding of myself and my practice, and it has given me challenges to address concerning how this body of work is to progress if I am to maintain integrity.
Most of all, I value the improved self-concept and the clarity that my reflections have imparted. For too long, I resisted fully engaging with my artistic side, fearing I had nothing worthwhile to say. And maybe I don't, but this writing exercise has reminded me: what I intend as the message is not always what people perceive.
But more importantly, sometimes things need to be said for no other reason than you need to say it.
Just like our human inability to perceive tree talk, who is to say we truly understand our own words?
John Fowles wrote: "We feel, or think we feel nearest to a tree's essence' when it chances to stand like us, in isolation, but evolution did not intend trees to grow singly. Far more than we are, they are social creatures... no more natural as isolated specimens than man is as a marooned sailor or a hermit."
My work about trees is ultimately about us—about memory and forgetting, about what we choose to see and what we omit, about how we're always telling stories even when we think we're just documenting reality. It's about recognising that in the digital age, we're making choices about memory that will shape not just what we remember, but who we can become.
The question is whether we're making those choices consciously, with a complete understanding of what we include and what we allow to fade.