William Blake said it pretty well: “The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see Nature all ridicule and deformity, and some scarce see Nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, Nature is Imagination itself.”
To the eyes of the man of imagination, sure. But also to the lens of Barbara Bosworth’s tripod-mounted large-format camera. The two decades of Bosworth’s photography that comprise Earth and Sky, on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum through early November, concerns itself predominantly (albeit not exclusively) with trees.
Bosworth conveys with eloquence and urgency the sentiment that these stoic, noble beasts must be revered and protected. But the show is more a symphony than a protest song.
Bosworth, who has taught photography at the Masschusetts College of Art and Design in Boston since 1984, is most renowned for her striking images of the National Champions. These are the specimens catalogued by the National Register of Big Trees (what can we tell you?; it actually exists) as the largest known representatives of their respective breeds. (And since we know you want to ask, the registry determines “largest” by measuring a tree’s height, the “wingspan” of its canopy and the circumference of its trunk, then adding the three numbers together.) Bosworth has photographed National Champions from Georgia to Washington state, her panoramic prints capturing each with a haunting, wintry clarity. Bosworth creates her multipanel scenes by exposing two to four 8-by-10-inch negatives from adjacent perspectives, then contact-printing them together on a single sheet of paper. The result is a single, continuous image that manages at once to exude stillness and to suggest the gentle pan of a motion-picture camera in the hands of a master cinematographer.
Though these arboreal portraits are the stars of the show, they’re not its sole attraction. Bosworth’s mid-’90s photo series “The Bitteroot River,” excerpted in Earth in Sky, is all autumnal sobriety, giving us patterns of rippling lake surfaces and, in one dramatic case, the prone and outstretched arm of a person who could very well be dead. The topography of the limb eerily echoes that of another image of a thin, bare tree branch, as if to suggest that the passing of one living thing is no more significant than that of any other. In still another picture, and out-of-focus fisherman offers his slithery catch to camera with both hands.
Bosworth’s more recent pictures, in color, lack the grandeur of her black-and-whites. Along with a series called “Meadow, Carlisle, Massachusetts” documenting the peculiarities of sunlight in the field near her home, the show includes a series of images of birds in the hands of people whose heads are out of frame. These headless torsos dwarf the fragile forms of the birds they hold in front of them — the artist’s subtle commentary, perhaps, on our increasingly tenuous relations with the “ridicule and deformity” that sustains us. But to Bosworth, Nature is imagination itself.
(If you go: Earth and Sky: Photographs by Barbara Bosworth; Through Nov. 9; The Smithsonian American Art Museum; Eighth and F streets NW, Washington; free; 202-633-1000; americanart.si.edu.)
