UC Irvine

The massive trees of the American West — sequoia, redwood, Douglas fir, Sitka spruce, and cedar trees— bear a particular and critical relationship to photography.  This project argues that the relationship of photography to the Big Trees is anything but passive; that is, photography benefits from, effects, and perpetuates violent human interference with these trees. In turn, these interventions allow for the tree to be successfully represented within the photographic frame. While these operations are most explicit within the context of logging in the Pacific Northwest, even under the mantle of preservation, trees and groves are frequently altered to drive visitation, and to foster extraordinary pictorial environments for tourist snapshots.

This project’s historical span, the mid-nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth, marked a period of momentous historic transition; the rapid industrialization of the American landscape in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in turn transformed early American visual and political culture. This period, which saw substantial efforts to profit from and effectively conquer the American forests, also sustained several key synchronicities and seemingly contradictory encounters with the tree, not limited to the confrontation between the Puritanical drive to civilize and clear the American wilderness against Romantic attitudes that found moral and religious value in the same. 

This dissertation project stands in between the camera’s lens and the Big Tree as subject and explores the rich contradictions that emerge from the historical confrontation between mechanical reproduction and the botanical.  The first chapter charts the formation of a highly specific portrait type that developed out of logging operations in the Pacific Northwest at the turn of the century. The second chapter of this project examines the significant material afterlife of felled trees, from the Big Trees that were transported East to the World’s Fairs, to the forests that were cleared to produce the very networks of rail transportation that allowed for the movement of these trees. The third chapter concerns photography’s role in the preservation of California’s Big Trees.

Even if this project is primarily concerned with photographic production over a roughly sixty-year span from the 1860s through the beginning of the nineteenth century, there is a particular timeliness and contemporary relevance to these images. The same challenges of visual representation of the Big Trees exist today, even if they are now met with new computer design technologies and digital media that push beyond the possibilities of the two-dimensional photographic frame.