Among Trees
Sean Kernan (Photographer), Sean Kernan, Anthony DoerrBooks.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Synopsis
The b&w photographs presented in this horizontal format volume (it's 8.25x11.5") are simply of trees, or in some cases, their shadows, taken in locations that include New York, England, Italy, China, Hawaii, Los Angeles, and the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State. Kernan includes an introductory essay to the full-page and two-page reproductions that make up the book. Not indexed. Annotation ©2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
The New Yorker
The great nineteenth-century American preacher and abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher called them "tabernacles of the air." They were depicted as soaring colossi on luminous canvases by the likes of Thomas Cole, and their virtues -- stately posture, rapid growth, a lofty crown of verdure, and a habit of forming cathedral-like groves -- were celebrated by Hawthorne and Thoreau and by such esteemed visitors as Dickens and Trollope. Taken together, they were perhaps New England's, and America's, most famous citizens: the leafy representatives of Ulmus americana, the American elm, a tree that for a few hundred years defined the American landscape and that an awestruck French naturalist once described as "the most magnificent vegetable of the temperate zone." In Thomas J. Campanella's edifying Republic of Shade, the mighty elm -- whose dominance as America's favorite tree was toppled by the devastating epidemic of Dutch-elm disease that began in 1931 -- rises again, as Campanella explores the history of the plant that launched an entire nation of Elm Streets.
Campanella points out that New York City was once famous for its lush, tree-lined avenues. In the photographer Sean Kernan's arresting Among Trees, New York's trees appear as boulevardiers decked out in Christmas lights. Kernan traversed the planet in search of tangled roots and dappled canopies, and his photographs frame trees as peaceful neighbors of the earth's human residents: palms arch into the Los Angeles twilight, and an unidentified specimen shares plaza space with an elderly Segovian gent. Kernan also plays with scale: a row of Tuscan poplars, sizable by human standards, is dwarfed by an electrical tower. (Mark Rozzo)