Two bare trees reach toward each other across a gap of fog and stop just short of touching. Reaching is a slow verb for a tree, a gesture conducted over decades, but the camera catches it as though mid-motion, and this is one of photography’s quiet specialties: it makes growth look like an event. Between the two crowns hangs a blank grey screen of sky; below, a snow-patched field, a dark path entering from the bottom edge, frost-stiffened grasses blurred by nearness, a low wooden fence keeping its distance.
Pictures usually promise a subject at the middle; this one puts fog there and holds together anyway. The trees behave like theatre curtains drawn back on an empty stage, and the longer you stay, the clearer it becomes that emptiness is the performance. Photography has always been good at things — it inventories the world helplessly — but it is rarer for a photograph to describe the distance between things, the charged air itself. That is what this blue-grey interval manages: the space between two trees made as palpable as the trees.
Its maker grew up in Kent, Ohio, works from the San Francisco Bay Area, and has long preferred fog, dusk and the view through glass to anything resembling fair weather; he titles his pictures with numbers, letting them stay usefully anonymous. SFMOMA, the Getty and the Whitney hold his prints. As an archival pigment print the image sustains that cold blue register without ever going flat, and the two trees stay caught mid-reach, a gesture the print declines to finish.
Two bare trees reach toward each other across a gap of fog and stop just short of touching. Reaching is a slow verb for a tree, a gesture conducted over decades, but the camera catches it as though mid-motion, and this is one of photography’s quiet specialties: it makes growth look like an event. Between the two crowns hangs a blank grey screen of sky; below, a snow-patched field, a dark path entering from the bottom edge, frost-stiffened grasses blurred by nearness, a low wooden fence keeping its distance.
Pictures usually promise a subject at the middle; this one puts fog there and holds together anyway. The trees behave like theatre curtains drawn back on an empty stage, and the longer you stay, the clearer it becomes that emptiness is the performance. Photography has always been good at things — it inventories the world helplessly — but it is rarer for a photograph to describe the distance between things, the charged air itself. That is what this blue-grey interval manages: the space between two trees made as palpable as the trees.
Its maker grew up in Kent, Ohio, works from the San Francisco Bay Area, and has long preferred fog, dusk and the view through glass to anything resembling fair weather; he titles his pictures with numbers, letting them stay usefully anonymous. SFMOMA, the Getty and the Whitney hold his prints. As an archival pigment print the image sustains that cold blue register without ever going flat, and the two trees stay caught mid-reach, a gesture the print declines to finish.