My connection to these trees began as they were burning. I lived ninety miles downwind. The smoke filled the air with an eerie orange haze. Ash settled silently on everything as I breathed in the carbon released from limbs, needles, and heartwood.

The western red cedars and Douglas firs lining the banks of the McKenzie River had survived more than two centuries of fierce upriver and downriver winds, as well as flooding and erosion. The 2020 fires raged and smoldered up and down the canyon for thirty-five days. Weeks after the smoke cleared, scorched needles and leaves dropped to the ground, covering the blackened forest floor with a golden brown blanket.

The fierce windstorm accompanying the fire met little resistance. Treetops broke off, plunging into the river. Limbs dangled, connected by tissues charred and crisp, and still the trees stood, a visual legacy of quiet persistence and rooted strength.

STANDING, STILL

Standing before these trees that had withstood so much, I wanted to make portraits that conveyed their dignity and grace. Using tonality to distinguish them from their surroundings, I sought to portray each as an individual survivor who is standing, still.

MOVING, STILL

Forests are sanctuaries of stillness. My heart rate slows when I enter them. My breath deepens. And yet, in reality, forests are always in motion. Trees move water from root to crown. Needles, lichens, and insects—litterfall—drift unnoticed to the forest floor.

Two years post-fire, gravity and decomposition work in harmony to dismantle the blackened sentinels. A limb falls. A treetop snaps. In bits and pieces the structures of these charred trees collapse into the river and are moving, still.

REACHING, STILL

Trees root in the mysteries of the dark soil while growing toward the light above. They have much to teach us about physical and spiritual qualities of light. Looking up to the broken tops and floating clouds I sense that, even in their demise, the trees are reaching, still.

— David Paul Bayles 2023

Magical Realism Meets Real Time Data

In 2018 I was offered an artist residency at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest near Blue River, Oregon. The forest has a history similar to my own evolution. The Andrews began as a 16,000-acre forest dedicated to the study of logging and forestry management with the goal of increasing efficiency, productivity, and yield. Along the way, and not without conflict, the applied science of the logging industry gave way to the basic science of ecology. A few decades after that change, the forest also became a place of inquiry for writers, artists, and musicians.

The Andrews is an ancient forest wired for the future. It is dotted with highly sensitive instruments taking measurements every five minutes. The Discovery Tree, nearly 200 feet tall,  has five sets of instruments attached to it at varying intervals. Emanating from its base, like spokes of a wheel, are other instruments, many of them probing deep into the soil. Like the watershed itself, all this data converge to become a powerful data stream flowing down the mountain to Oregon State University via a T1 line.

My residency at the Andrews came at a perfect time. I had been making pictures in the industrial tree plantations that surround my home and studio in western Oregon. There are three cycles that a tree plantation undergoes in less than one year’s time: clearcutting, limb burning, new seedling planting. Then the plantation is left alone for 40 years before the cycle begins anew. These are controlled landscapes where nothing is allowed to grow old. I longed to see what this particular landscape looked like before its transformation from ancient forest to tree farm.

When I entered the magnificent ancient forest that is the centerpiece of the Andrews, I was overwhelmed by the feeling of being at home. Not a physical home but a deeper, more spiritual home. The forest feels at once like a cathedral and a fantasy. I embraced the opportunity to experiment with techniques that would convey these qualities photographically. To do that—to express what I had experienced in the forest—I decided to use a technique that would bend time and skew colors, resulting in images that hover at the edge of reality.

The technique involves controlling the tripod-mounted camera with an iPad via Bluetooth technology, a wireless radio signaling device, to fire a large battery-powered strobe light. The images shown here comprise two to three dozen different exposures, all of them made without ever touching the camera. After a series of ambient light exposures were made, I turned on the strobe light and began a journey through the scene, illuminating elements along the way. In post-production, the multiple exposures were layered, blended, and adjusted, ultimately creating one image from many. 

At the same time, the forest was making its own drawings from the data being collected by the scientific instruments—on solar radiation, relative humidity, precipitation, soil water content, air and soil temperature, wind speed and direction. I’ve seen graphs all my life, but I was deeply moved by the colorful lines and dots in these particular data drawings, seeming to reveal the forest’s secrets in a mysterious code. After sharing my excitement with several scientists, they offered to create drawings from the information that had been gathered at the time each of my photographs was made. These drawings, hung from pieces of tree limbs, have been exhibited alongside my photographs in what I call an old growth dialogue. An example of one such pairing is included here in this introduction.

Though the images are time-stamped (their titles are composed of the dates and times they were made), the forest when you are in it seems to exist outside of time, indeed beyond human measurement of any kind, at least to a non-scientist like me. My residency at the Andrews is a dream come true. I get to absorb as much science as I want, but I’m also free to steep in the magic and wonder of not knowing at all.

Our bodies have 3 billion genetic building blocks, or base pairs, that make us who we are. And of those 3 billion base pairs, only a tiny amount are unique to us, making us about 99.9% genetically similar to the next human.

While cities across America were reacting with righteous indignation to the murder of George Floyd, I was with them in spirit while splitting and stacking an oak tree that fell on my land.

Some of the forked tree sections were too difficult to split by hand with my eight lb. maul. I used my chainsaw to cut part way through the tough and twisted grain. I then used the maul to finish splitting the round.

While stacking one particular piece, I stopped in my woodshed and moved the piece around watching the way the light, coming in from the side, played with the different textures between the sawn and split portions of the wood.

I immediately carried the piece from woodshed to studio. While setting up light and camera I followed one growth ring of grain from the top to the bottom. At the dividing line between split and sawn it became so visually different.

With so much genetics and biology that we share in common, how does that one tenth of one percent cause hearts and minds to split into hate and destruction?

In the mid-1970’s I worked as a logger on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada Mountains to earn money for photography school. A decade later while photographing loggers in northern California for a museum show, I saw the felling of a tree in ways I had not seen as a logger. There is a point when the opposing forces of energy were held in suspension. Those few seconds, between life and death, seemed simultaneously ephemeral and eternal.

At first the motion is slight and distinct. A vibration moves quickly up the tree, its top shakes and quivers, resisting the moment when gravity takes hold. The sounds are individual and clear. There is a creak, a screech, a crackle as the fibers slowly rip apart, separating the tree into stump and log.

As the falling tree gains momentum, sound and motion begin to blur. The surrounding trees, still standing, sway back and forth in the wake of the falling tree. The veiled retorts of breaking limbs ricochet like gunshot or backfire.

When the tree hits the ground, the sound is indistinguishable from the sensation. It is deep and thunderous. It pounds your eardrums and sends a shock wave up your legs. You see, hear, and feel the moment simultaneously.

Eventually the last limb falls, the ground stops shaking and the dust settles on a new and forever altered landscape.

-- David Paul Bayles, Orion Magazine

Our fairy tales and folk tales depict the forest as a place beyond our human comprehension of time. For millenia we revered and feared the deep mysteries of the forest.

We have lived with forests much longer than we have lived from them.

In the Pacific Northwest our big forests have been stripped of their wild. They are now efficient industrial landscapes planted with engineered seedlings. Landscapes where the wild lumberjack was replaced by articulating feller buncher machines.

Working Forest is a brilliant industry term created about a decade ago designed to phase out the harsher sounding words, logging, cutting and chopping. Working is both a noun and an adjective. Working Forest is malleable enough to allow for calculated wordplay. They grow forests and harvest tree farms. Working Forest is a term that allows users to have it both ways. It’s a term that fits the family with twenty acres of trees to the multi billion dollar corporation.

Working Forest is a term that suggests a future where all land works for us.

These images depict my relationship with a specific Working Forest. A landscape within walking distance of my studio door. A landscape where on one day I round the bend to see light streaming through hundred-twenty foot tall trees. A few weeks later I round the same bend to see ground fog lingering over stumps and slash piles like spirits of the deceased not quite ready to leave. It is a landscape I some times embrace and sometimes abhor.

It is a landscape that now fits our human comprehension of time. It is a landscape always transitioning through cutting, burning and growing. A completed cycle lasts forty years. Two cycles fit neatly into a human lifetime.

I leave my studio and walk for an hour through a landscape both bucolic and broken. A landscape my grandchildren will learn is neither forest, nor working.

" ... Bayles' images of trees avoid the trap of propaganda; these are not cute or angry or tragic surrogates for human politics. Instead, they seem weirdly like visitors from another world, perhaps another dimension -- and, in a real sense, they are. Trees, no less than epoch-layerd rock canyons, remind us that there are different ways of computing time; that within the frantic rush of man-made cities are eddies and rills of slowness, sureness; that there are cycles as profound as the procession of the stars..."

--- Richard Cheverton, Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine

Early in the morning on the day my grandson Arlo was born, I was in the orchard house reading a review of Peggy Wallace Kennedy’s memoir, Broken Road. Kennedy is the daughter of George Wallace.

Her life has been a long effort toward reckoning with her family’s racist past. When her sons were born she was determined to help them live with love and respect for all people.

On the 50th anniversary of the 1965 “Bloody Sunday” march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, Kennedy walked across the bridge with Bernice King, the youngest daughter of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. They held hands as a symbol of strength, unity, and commitment toward a better future for all people.

An image of their black and white clasped hands was in my mind when I walked to the window and looked out into the orchard. Until then I had seen the grafted trees, dark at the trunk and light where the trees begin to branch out, solely as a metaphor for how light-skinned people had so often reaped the fruit of the labor of dark-skinned people.

Thirty years ago the Black Walnut rootstock was grafted with the white-barked English Walnut scion. The outer layer of bark still bears the historical record of that forced union, while the inner tissues of the trees took a mere eight weeks to fuse together, sending moisture from the roots to the leaves and photosynthesized sugars from the leaves to the roots. Seven years later, and every year since, the trees have borne fruit.

With the image of Kennedy’s and King’s black and white clasped hands, I walked into the orchard choosing to also see hope.

There is a fascinating microcosm in my woodpile, usually hidden from view. It’s a world of insects and fungi thriving in the inner layer between bark and wood. Certain beetles create precisely etched lines as they eat their way through the wood, leaving marks referred to by entomologists as beetle galleries. They chew, digest, poop, make babies and turn a giant tree into compost. These are works of art by creatures living their primal impulse.

I built a library of these images while splitting the firewood to heat my studio. Simultaneously I was making photographs of primal mark making by human beings on the outside of tree bark.

The oldest human-made marks are found in Sulawesi, Indonesia and were created 39,900 years ago. They placed their hands on the cave wall and blew pigmented dust to create a stenciled image. Of the many hundreds of photographs I have made of human mark-making on tree bark, the two most common are some form of ‘I was here’, or an expression of love.

One day while napping in the hammock by my creek I woke suddenly with a complete image in my mind. It was a collage made up of two separate images. One was a heart shaped scar from a carving on a Mimosa tree and the other was a beetle gallery from my woodpile.

My first reaction was I don’t do collage work like that. The I went straight to my studio and created the image I saw as I awoke. Each of the images in DeCompose is made by layering and blending one image from the beetle or fungi collection and one human made mark.

In the early seventies I decided to become a photographer. The school I wanted to attend was very expensive so I looked for legal ways to make a lot of money in a short period of time. My sister's boyfriend invited me to leave Los Angeles and come to the mountains and work in the woods. One season turned into four years of setting chokers, bumping knots and skinning cat.

On my last day working in the woods, my rigging crew and I shared beers and farewells at the local bar. Jack Hannah, our siderod, said, “You moved here from the city and became the best damn choker setter. When you’re done with that photo school, don’t forget us dirty old loggers.”

Ten years later at the height of the Pacific Northwest battle between the logging industry and the environmental movement, I worked with the Mendocino County Museum to create a portrait exhibit of loggers. Along with the portraits were excerpts from the oral histories I recorded. The exhibit traveled to four museums. The last was the World Forestry Center in Portland, Oregon.