The Neighbourwoods

How not to photograph a tree

Sep 06, 2024

In the winter of 2021, perhaps appreciating the world around me in a more vivid light following the lockdowns, I began to notice the intricate and elegant ways that urban trees were casting their shadows on Brighton’s streets and buildings. As I cycled around the city I began to spot these patterns plastered all over town and I started to photograph the ones I found most interesting. Over time it became a little project.

Like a temporary piece of graffiti or public art, these trees were acting as a sundial of sorts, throwing fleeting, unique shapes across their surroundings once a day. It seemed like such a wonderful aspect of city life, but one which was entirely overlooked by anyone passing by. Trees are just another part of the urban jungle after all.

Documenting these tree shadows made me think about the kinds of places we live in and the way we take these magnificent arboreal additions to our community for granted. So often I only notice an urban tree when it disappears, lost to disease or at the hands of developers. Keeping an eye out for interestingly shaped shadows meant keeping an eye out for interestingly shaped trees and I’ve become much more aware of where we have lots, and where we don’t have enough. We need our urban trees. We need them for their cooling effect on hot days; for cleaning our polluted air; for wildlife habitats; for our own well-being, but they remain sadly underrated and undervalued.

Initially I was fascinated by these shadows at a very graphic level. I enjoy the layering of a two dimensional shape onto a three dimensional world and the way they warp around edges and creep around corners. There is also something pleasing about the simplicity of a shadow. They reveal a tree’s structure without any of the distraction of colour, texture or details beyond the outlines. A monochrome element in a colourful environment. A tree made entirely from the absence of light.

Over the course of the next two years, I began to enjoy the challenge of making a project about trees, but without taking any pictures of the trees themselves. Do we even need to see the tree to enjoy its presence? Having spent so much time taking very detailed pictures in the woods, I find it pleasing that these photos leave so much unsaid. You have to imagine what these trees look like for yourself. Are they old and grand or short and cheery? Full of colour or forebodingly bleak? Are they noticed? Are they loved? Would you miss them if they were gone?

I’m not really sure these are pictures of trees at all.

There are twenty pictures from the project below and hopefully this will prompt me to upload them all to my website in the near future. This was always just one of those side projects, a creative exercise without any particular end point in mind, but perhaps a few prints may emerge as a little portfolio at some point this winter.

Now | Here | This

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