Introduction
In March of 2020, the world was turned upside down by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), more commonly referred to as COVID -19. On a global scale, everything came to a grinding halt and the subsequent year+ saw society operate in what I term a “disconnected connectedness.” The overwhelming byproduct of this disconnected connectedness was the imposition by circumstance of solitary confinement, both in individual contexts and within family and/or community contexts. People were essentially sealed off from each other either through choice or, to the anger of some, by force of government mandates. We remained loosely tethered together by not much other than electronic communication.
This radical alteration of day-to-day existence stripped so much of what we normally had taken for granted (e.g., eating at restaurants) in our everyday lives before the major inflection point – which by my count occurred somewhere around March 15, 2020. The sudden elimination of so many common dynamics of interaction left an indelible imprint on me and turned a photo-studies project I’d already begun involving explorations of dead trees into a journey of self-discovery. This self-discovery, however, was not immediately apparent until the project began coming together in its latter stages of development.
Ostensibly about the solitude of dead trees – their perpetuity as lonesome artifacts of times long gone, their positioning, in most cases, in the middle of nowhere, their quietly communicated defiance against the elements – the obviousness of the subject matter began taking on a higher significance the more I inspected the product of my work. There was something beyond simple admiration of their stark, lonely beauty.
As I reviewed the archive of nearly 700 photos compiled from, roughly, January 2020 through August 2020, I noticed abstract, thematic peculiarities in certain compositions that could not have been present by pure chance. Something else was at play in my mind’s eye as I snapped these photographs, something deep within my subconscious that was connecting the solitary plight of the trees with the isolation I was experiencing in my own human condition of the moment.
As I whittled the full archive down to the final 20 photos that comprised my “Ghost Trees” project, these peculiarities jumped out in force. The images began taking on mirror-like qualities to images from pop culture and history that had previously imprinted on my brain. Surely by no accident, the mirror images these trees represented were all, universally, associated with solitude, crisis, tragedy, defiance, brute force and/or quiet, melancholic beauty. These are all qualities that I personally associate with the frame of time in humanity from which the original photographs were taken and are qualities that will forever link that time with the feelings and moments I derive from their mirror “twins.”
What follows is an examination of the best examples of this mirroring and the thematic relationships between the tree images and their mirrors.
Alan Pakula Cinema
Alan Pakula’s reputation for directing films with tangled, almost indecipherable, plots (e.g., Klute (1971), All the President’s Men (1976)) is unparalleled. The narratives of his most famous works, however, are secondary to the way the way he uses visual perspective, framing, angles and objects to simultaneously obfuscate and unravel the stories his films tell. The images, sometimes expressed in a fashion nonlinear to the actual story, operate like puzzle pieces scattered across a floor and demand a level of intense scrutiny and processing from the viewer unheard of in contemporary cinema. Like great works of music, new details are revealed with each viewing and, to this day, his films continue to be dissected for their ultimate meaning.
The object photo seemed at the time of composition like an interesting silhouette, but it stuck with me from the moment I captured it. It communicates a sort of tranquil dread. Note the flow of motion is directly opposite to the mirror image and at about the same level. The colors are eerily similar, and the web of tree branches and other foliage against the grey skyscape mirror the image from the film almost identically.
The mirror image here is taken from my favorite film of Pakula’s oeuvre, The Parallax View (1974). It features the film’s main character (Warren Beatty) isolated in front of and, by this point in the narrative, overwhelmed by, a building that may (or may not) contain the secrets to political assassinations. It is a masterful visual contemplation on the smallness of the individual against forces unseen and perhaps uncontainable.
The primary color grey (but also black with hints of blue, violet and green) conveys a lack of emotion and, as noted in Sean Adams’ The Designer’s Dictionary of Color (2017 edition), is often associated with weapons, business suits and conformity, all predominant themes in the film’s narrative. Propelling these colors, and enhancing the sense of dread, is the weblike window framing of the building structure and the sporadic lighting emanating from inside the structure. Taken in total, we have an image that, without doing much, communicates an ominous foreshadowing for the events that unfold once Beatty enters and drives the web of intrigue central to the plot through to its final, not-easily interpreted conclusion.
Belushi
I have a theory that everyone is subconsciously driven by (or in my case, obsessed with) a period of time that might be, roughly, 10 years prior to their birth and, roughly, 10 years after their birth. We want to know where we came from, and we want to know what manifested the people we become. For me, one major flashpoint around that concept is John Belushi. I am supremely intrigued by him and, as such, continue reading the same things about his life and death, searching for a way around his ultimate demise. His death, while tragic, was the culmination of his two halves (gentle, brilliant, vulnerable versus manic, obsessive, self-loathing) colliding uncontrollably. By all accounts, his light and dark sides operated in equal measure until the very end, when the darkness overwhelmed him, leaving him isolated from those that loved him and surrounded instead by dread. A ship lost at sea.
The object photo required a conversion to black and white before I saw its mirror, but when I did that, it was obvious. The life of the tree – or what’s left of it – is reaching out to the light. Its dead half consumed by the dark to the right.
The mirror image, taken from the set of Saturday Night Live in 1978, has always been one of my favorites of Belushi. It captures him in a quiet, perhaps reflective moment – the sort of composition that was the very antithesis of the public image perpetuated by both his on-camera persona and the media. In the context of his death and the two opposing psychologies he struggled to resolve, the photo reflects the qualities of a Greek tragedy.
While his face is pointed in the general direction of the light, his eyes are clearly looking off into the distance somewhere that is not quite the middle of the frame. The back of his head and hair are drowned out by darkness and shadow, as if foreboding is descending upon him from behind with the slight cock of his head backward indicating that maybe he knows it’s coming. And while he does not reach forward toward the light like the tree, I want him to – and the negative space in the photo is demanding him to. I’m still rooting for those eyes to look toward the light and rewrite the inevitable conclusion his life would come to three and a half years later.
Tiananmen Square
The massacre at Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989 was, of course, brutal. It was also a pretty good example of a government responding to rapidly evolving societal discord in the most reactive way possible. Estimates of the death toll range from hundreds to thousands.
Taken in early July 2020 at, concurrently, like many of these photos, the simultaneous nadir and apex of public and government response to the virus, the object photo depicts a singular ghost tree facing toward stormy skies. It resonated with me over time as being analogous to its universally recognized mirror image of “Tank Man.”
Tank Man, like the tree, stood defiantly in front of an armored tank column the day after the Tiananmen Square massacre began. He would reposition himself every time the tanks attempted to maneuver around him, no doubt infuriating both the tank commander and the government. To this day photos and videos of the incident are censored in China. With his business attire and briefcase, Tank Man projected the strength individuals can have against the machine, figuratively and literally.
He stood tough and survived that moment. And while no one knows what happened to Tank Man (theories vary), I don’t know what happened to the tree either, but like Tank Man, it stood there that morning defiantly against the approaching storm and gave me a sense of defiance against COVID in the moment I photographed it.
Captain Willard
By August 2020, it was evident the virus wasn’t going away anytime soon. There had been the predicted summer surge and, at the time, news of vaccines was still that of the “in process” variety rather than the “it’s done and ready” variety. It was with this doom and gloom I went out one night and captured the object photo of this lone dead tree against a fiery-orange sunset. Upon closer inspection, I realized how much the object photo reminded me of the mirror image, a still from 1979’s Apocalypse Now.
Like the object photo, the mirror image depicts dead trees directly in front of flames, with Martin Sheen’s Captain Willard, occupying the negative space and reeling in a trance-like state. At the stage of the film the still is from, we know Willard is a lost soul in need of something to focus his considerable, unique talents on. What we don’t yet know is that he’s about to embark on the main thread of the narrative that will see him both ascend along the fictitious Nùng River in search of truth and descend into a world where the truth makes no sense.
The parallels between the point in the film from which the mirror image is taken and the state of the virus at the time are stark. By that point in 2020, we were only about five months into the COVID ordeal and many, many months away from any restoration of normalcy. For instance, vaccines wouldn’t be widely available for another eight months (and that still wasn’t the “end” of it) after this photo was taken.
It would seem I had subconsciously channeled my own trip up the river, and perhaps the same irreconcilable, perpetually confounding, quest for the truth.
Harry Callahan
Defiance is the word that primarily comes to mind when you think of Clint Eastwood’s iconic Inspector Harry Callahan character. Supportive of the machine/system to a point (“Until a better one comes along.”), but rogue in almost every definition of the word, his character stands strong against the ever-inscrutable “system” and the criminal underworld around him. The 1971 film from which the mirror image is taken not only launched the “Dirty Harry” film franchise but, some might say, the entire genre of modern-day police-action films.
The object photo here depicts a lone tree, standing defiantly against a doomy backdrop, and appears, unlike many of the other compositions in this series, to be looking directly at us in a most protective way, guarding against both the elements and the unknown. It also appears larger than life despite the immensity and fluidity of the background and, as a tree, dives into the bottom of the frame, forever anchored to its environment.
The mirror image – not only a pivotal scene from the film Dirty Harry, but also one of the more iconic images of both the character and film franchise – features Eastwood pursuing a perpetrator after foiling an attempted robbery. While the colors don’t reflect the object image, the compositions of each picture match nearly exactly. Harry stands, looking directly at us, the singular focus of our attention despite the chaos and fluidity taking place behind him. His posture and stoic expression mirror the tree’s defiance against the events transpiring behind it and together they both communicate a singular expression of protection and rock-solid commitment to purpose. The shadow of his movement, appearing directly below on the y-axis of perspective and diving directly into and out of the bottom of the frame, subtly communicates how firmly rooted he is in the moment. Like the tree, Harry is a permanent, protective fixture in his unpredictable and threatening environment.
Neil McCauley
The technically proficient and supremely solitary man is often a subject explored in the films of Michael Mann (e.g., Thief (1981), Manhunter (1986), Heat (1995)). The simplicity he uses to communicate that solitude is, while blunt, never anything less than beautiful. I would argue that these images of longing, dread, emptiness and contemplation do an extraordinary job of replicating those same moments that we all experience in reality. They ask open-ended questions of the viewer about the very meaning of actions and consequences in non-linear ways and are regularly framed around sparsely populated foregrounds set against enigmatic, fluid backgrounds like oceans (Heat) and airport runways (Manhunter). Mann’s cinematic MacGuffin’s are not the monetary rewards of heists, they are the freedom that his protagonists yearn for.
The object photo, taken on the beach during an overcast sunrise above the Atlantic Ocean, immediately jumped out as a reflection of the mirror image taken from what is likely Mann’s most famous film, Heat. The tree looks lost in contemplation looking out over the ocean, with an obliviousness to the environmental factors that have shaped it to that point and will continue exerting their influence over it long after this photo was taken.
The mirror image depicts Robert DeNiro as master thief Neil McCauley in his ocean-side house in the early hours of morning after both accepting a new contract for a bank heist and falling in love, quietly contemplating how those two diametrically opposed variables might co-exist. With the vastness of the Pacific Ocean subtly beckoning to him, we at this point in the film know his MacGuffin is the freedom permanent flight to New Zealand might give him. However, we also know that there are three environmental forces working against his plan in the form of a dogged police detective, an axis of loosely connected enemies and, of course, time (as in, he has little of it). We know at this early stage of the film what McCauley does not: he will not succeed against the elements.
In Between Autumn and Winter
There are several poignant, tender moments woven into the otherwise adrenalized screenplay of 1975’s cold war spy thriller Three Days of the Condor. One of my favorites is the interlude involving Joe Turner (Robert Redford) observing the detached beauty of Kathy’s (Faye Dunaway) photographs as being “lonely” and “Winter…not quite winter. They look like November.”
It is a most unwittingly romantic moment because even though at this point in the narrative, Joe is still holding Kathy against her will, the photos have immediately established Kathy as a lonely, desolate soul. As such, she is a perfect companion for Joe, a low-level CIA contractor who has seen his life turned upside down in the hours preceding this moment in the film thanks to his accidental discovery of an international conspiracy. His future at this stage of the film not only looks empty, but as if it won’t last beyond a few more hours.
The images depicted in the film as Kathy’s passion are truly beautiful. They are also supremely desolate, like the mirror image here (one of two featured in the film). The object photo here immediately reminded me of the mirror image (even though the object photo was taken in July, not November). The angles are almost identical, the coloring is very similar and, most startlingly, the right half of each image features gnarled wood and the left half of each image features smooth wood.
Each image is in its own way a statement about time and vacancy and how those two things intersect far too often. An empty bench that is unoccupied more often than occupied. A desolate beach of driftwood that is as quiet and lonely as it is intriguing.
These concepts are integral to both the name of the object photo, “In Between Autumn & Winter,” and the observations Redford makes in the film about that time of year that is the most vacant of all. Grey, dead and empty – the vacancy of that time of year where it’s not quite autumn anymore, but also not yet winter. For some reason, I love that time of year – its ambiguity of direction is both melancholically disorienting and liberating at the same time.
The World Trade Centers (Before They Fell)
In modern American history, there are few subjects that better communicate an imposing sense of dread than the original World Trade Centers. With a clinical, minimalist design courtesy of designer Minoru Yamasaki (also responsible for stark, dystopian designs like the Pruitt-Igoe Housing Project in St. Louis and the Century Plaza Towers in Los Angeles), these buildings were simultaneously out of place during their entire existence and a symbol of American dominance. They imposed themselves on lower Manhattan before they were even built and subsequently presided over it with a draconian shadow for the three decades they stood. To those points, it always seemed fitting that the predominant modern empire of the Twentieth Century was represented by such gargantuan, blunt architectural structures.
Regardless, every photograph of the Twin Towers tells a story with a defined beginning, middle and end. Americans of a certain age cannot look at photos like the mirror image here without immediately connecting to the omnipresence of the Towers’ living years and the tragedy of their downfall.
The object photo here captures a visual perspective I prefer for taller objects; looking up from low angles in an attempt to capture and convey their great presence. This composition, however, was driven more by the backdrop and the finely textured sky shrouding the trees themselves, enveloping them in an ominous context. The two trees, despite structural differences, look very similar as well and immediately reminded me of the original Trade Centers. In addition, when compared to the mirror image of the Trade Centers themselves, the juxtaposition of the trees relative to each other eerily matches the real thing, reminding the viewer that the defiance appreciated about the trees is not limitless. They will eventually succumb to whatever demise their future holds for them.
Thoughtful and intriguing photography and writing. Real insight into your personal observations and inspirations for your photography.