Photographing the forest

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It’s been 30 years or so since I started taking photos of forests. Though 30 years is no time at all to a towering tree that has been on the planet almost a thousand.
It all began in 1989 and my encounter with the forest of Quinault in Washington State, a place of sacred significance to the local native Americans. In 2011 I then found myself photographing forest on the Japanese island of Yakushima. Witnessing the terrible destruction of life in March of that year by the merciless forces of nature, unleashed by the massive earthquake in Tohoku, I was driven to return to the forest once more, to seek out the origins of life I felt sure were there. I subsequently returned to the forest several times; in May 2017 visiting Quinault again, then Yakushima, and the virgin forest of the Kasuga Taisha shrine in Nara, photographing them all.
Conventionally attractive landscape photography holds no interest whatsoever for me. Nor do what are generally referred to as nature photos. To my mind, I take the photographs I do because I am seduced by the “forest” as a particular manifestation of the primeval dispensation of living things; a place where living and dead coexist in a chaotic jumble, over the years blending harmoniously to create the world we find there: the secret harmony of the forest that gradually becomes apparent if we submerge ourselves in the forest, and quietly observe it. A pleasant, perfect rhythm beyond human capability. I was feeling this rhythm in every fiber of my being; walking around the forest, sensing it with my whole body, desperate to capture that state alive, and capture it all in a photo. It was at this point the forest began to proffer me the occasional hidden gateway. One day I would pass without noticing; on another it would open wide, beckoning me into a miraculous realm. But if I allowed my eyes to stray for even a moment, that door would slam shut, never to be found again even though I knew the whole experience was actually inside me.
It’s always like that when I walk in the forest.
In the forest there are places that are calming and comforting, and unsettling that evoke a strange, lingering uneasiness. Encountering the latter, unconsciously you find yourself walking faster, trying to get out of there as quickly as possible. Yet there are also forests that make you want to settle in, stay there as long as permitted, forever in fact; forests where the sublime beauty of the trees renders time meaningless. One day, I sensed the difference between the two: it was light.
Places bathed in a pleasant light speak of the ceaseless circle of life, forming a forest with a wonderful rhythm. In dark forests where the sun doesn’t shine, that circle is broken and the rhythm lost, until eventually the forest gives way to a graveyard of dead things, losing the power to generate life.
Obviously, I am as attracted as anyone to forests teeming with life; life-giving forests pierced by shafts of soft light and possessed of an appealing rhythm that nurtures living things. As I walk around a forest my usual question arises: why try to photograph the forest? What is it of the forest I am trying to capture? In the forest, I can bear witness to the soothing rhythm of life at any moment; an experience akin to suddenly encountering a passage of music with an exquisite melody.
And so, pondering such matters, I make my way deeper and deeper into the forest, from time to time noticing the forest’s subtle messages. Looking hard I find places, points, that command attention. Focusing intently, I slowly approach, until sensing I can go no closer, and quietly coming to a halt. There I might find a section of glittering bark on a giant tree, or part of a moss-covered fallen tree, illuminated. Shifting my gaze to the surroundings, I spy the roots of what was once a behemoth of a tree, crumbled away to a scarlet powder; ferns glistening bluishly; dead branches, fallen leaves, moist lichen that covers it all in a gentle embrace. Gazing upward now far into the treetops, I see trees overlapping, forming a gradation of delicate harmony. My eyes are drawn especially to giants of the forest glowing green, and others of a heavy red hue. Thus my gaze flits here and there, unconsciously following the same line of sight time after time. Allowing my gaze to travel up and down the bark of a tree, I study the texture as if checking its feel with my hand. It shifts yet again: to little greenish-yellow leaves growing at the roots of a tree, to vivid green fern fronds. Innumerable fragments of tree bark peeled off and fallen, glistening silverly like fish scales; dead branches, lush, verdant mosses gently wrapping what has accumulated over the years and decayed. Fallen trees too, attempt to nestle in that embrace. All repeated on the ground behind. Gradations, undulations.
My eyes move to the adjacent tree, and I lose myself in the relationship between tree and tree. My gaze shifts to the branches. Long limbs extending horizontally are bowed. The moss known as horsetail, entwined like cotton on the needles, shines aqua, suffused with morning dew. The branches seem to droop increasingly under the weight. My gaze, my whole consciousness is commanded by their colors, and moves from details to coloring. The color of bark on large trees that catch my eye, Douglas firs silvery-blue, is so arresting I could gaze on it forever. Here and there, thin patches of elegant pale greenish-yellow moss spread over the bark. I caress the gradation of silver-blue on bark and pale yellow-green of the moss softly with my eyes, and notice that without my noticing, my attention has been diverted entirely to color. My gaze moves at leisure to the layers of infinite colors extending across the roots: red, green, brown, blue, yellow, black, silver, gold, purple, orange; lighter and darker, over many years becoming jumbled together, piling up, dissolving into each other. The colors of a place of living things, and things dead yet still possessing color. Deeper in, I note these undulating colors continuing. Looking up high, the overlapping colors of trees and foliage weave a stunning brocade, delicate gradations of blue and green forming warp and weft. My gaze moves abruptly to trees and branches alongside each other, because the breeze that sweeps through the forest from time to time makes branches sway. Foliage moving in the wind is sometimes that of conifers, sometimes of broadleaf trees. The low-drooping foliage of conifers sinks in deep blackish blue, while a soft light piercing the outstretched branches of tall trees shines on water filled with tangled moss, offering up a palette of exquisite pale blue.
Having acquired a taste of all this color, my gaze now moves from limb to limb, to a blue almost black in its darkness, and a glistening aqua. The wonder of the contrast awakens the senses, prompting my gaze to move rapidly to contours and details, tracing finer and finer aspects of the scene. To each moss entwined on tree bark, each piece of bark. Eyes move seamlessly from the crumbling trunk of a large fallen tree, to the mountain of decaying tree-dust, a startling red, spilled and piling there the deep green of moss coating trunk; the texture of trunk crumbled to powder; the contrast of soft and dewy textures become riveting, each and every one. My gaze shifts about, detail gradually segueing into the whole, the movement of my gaze from detail to whole, from detail to coloring, outlines to volume. Gaze and consciousness shift and awaken, shift and awaken, these movements continuing indefinitely I suppose, if I can just keep my eyes on the scene. In the same manner as blood races through veins and arteries at breakneck speed, never stopping until the demise of the flesh.
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Artist statement by Yoshihiko Ueda on the occasion of the exhibition “Forest: Impressions and Memories, 1989-2017” at Gallery 916. Further info here.

The impossible realm

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I guess I believe that there exists a genuine mystery at the heart of songwriting. Certain lines can appear at the time to be almost incomprehensible, but they nevertheless feel very true, very true indeed. And not just true, but necessary, and humming with a kind of unrevealed meaning. Through writing, you can enter a space of deep yearning that drags its past along with it and whispers into the future, that has an acute understanding of the way of things. You write a line that requires the future to reveal its meaning.
(…)
And that ties in to what we’ve spoken about before, that there is another place that can be summoned through practice that is not the imagination, but more a secondary positioning of your mind with regard to spiritual matters. It’s complex, and I’m not sure I can really articulate it. The priest and religious writer Cynthia Bourgeault talks about ‘the imaginal realm’, which seems to be another place you can inhabit freely that separates itself from the rational world and is independent of the imagination. It is a kind of liminal state of awareness, before dreaming, before imagining, that is connected to the spirit itself. It is an ‘impossible realm’ where glimpses of the preternatural essence of things find their voice. Arthur lives there. Inside that space, it feels a relief to trust in certain glimpses of something else, something other, something beyond. Does that make sense?
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Excerpts from the chapter “The Impossible Realm”, in “Faith, Hope and Carnage”, a conversation between Nick Cave and Seán O’ Hagan. Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2023, pp. 36-39.

The utility of belief

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Religion is spirituality with rigour, I guess, and, yes, it makes demands on us. For me, it involves some wrestling with the idea of faith – that seam of doubt that runs through most credible religions. It’s that struggle with the notion of the divine that is at the heart of my creativity.
(…)
Well, yes, mainly because as I’ve gotten older, I have also come to see that maybe the search is the religious experience – the desire to believe and the longing for meaning, the moving towards the ineffable. Maybe that is what is essentially important, despite the absurdity of it. Or, indeed, because of the absurdity of it.
When it comes down to it, maybe faith is just a decision like any other. And perhaps God is the search itself.
(…)
Perhaps, but rational truth may not be the only game in town. I am more inclined to accept the idea of poetic truth, or the idea that something can be ‘true enough’. To me that’s such a beautiful, humane expression.
(…)
Well, I think we’re all suffering, Seán, and more often than not this suffering is a hell of our own making, it is a state of being for which we are responsible, and I have personally needed to find some kind of deliverance from that. One way I do that is to try to lead a life that has moral and religious value, and to try to look at other people, all people, as if they are valuable. I feel that when I have done something to hurt an individual, say, that the wrongdoing also affects the world at large, or even the cosmic order. I believe that what I have done is an offence to God and should be put right in some way. I also believe our positive individual actions, our small acts of kindness, reverberate through the world in ways we will never know. I guess what I am saying is – we mean something. Our actions mean something. We are of value.
(…)
Yes, and the luminous and shocking beauty of the everyday is something I try to remain alert to, if only as an antidote to the chronic cynicism and disenchantment that seems to surround everything, these days. It tells me that, despite how debased or corrupt we are told humanity is and how degraded the world has become, it just keeps on being beautiful. It can’t help it.
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Some excerpts of the chapter “The Utility of Belief”, from “Faith, Hope and Carnage”, a thoughtful conversation between Nick Cave and Seán O’ Hagan. Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2023, pp. 19-30 (emphasis in original).