American Beech
In November 2020, I bushwhacked into an Upper Peninsula forest dominated by American beech trees. I measured out a 10’x10′ square, stepped inside and didn’t step out again for 65 hours. Beyond my quadrant camp, the landscape was littered with felled behemoths, victims of a fungus spread by sap-feeding insects – beech bark disease – estimated to wipe out 80-90% of mature beech trees at Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore.
My plan was basic and barely thought out – create a photographic impression of the landscape as big as the forest itself – a eulogy to what’s been lost. And so, using a 100mm lens mounted to a fluid head tripod, I began shooting in a grid-like pattern, combining vertical camera motion with one-second shutter speed to accentuate the vertical nature of trees.
After three days of stillness and solitude, I couldn’t bring myself to part with the forest indefinitely. I vowed to return three more times over the coming year, making an impression of the landscape from the same exact spot in each season, come of it what may. At the time, I hadn’t produced even a single large-scale piece, let alone one that combined multiple seasons, and I naively assumed that the process would be straightforward.
When I finally sat down to edit in November 2021, the project quickly stalled on an aging iMac without sufficient RAM. Months went by. Then years. Projects came and went. My shooting techniques improved exponentially. By the time I bought a computer up to the task, I had considered abandoning the piece entirely. But “American Beech” deserved to be made, not just because it was my first, but because of the meaningful time I spent with the trees of that forest … because of the commitment that I made to them.
My initial vision for the piece was to illustrate the passing of time with basic feathered blends between each season, which clearly didn’t work. This was my first hard lesson in the post-production process of a four-season blend – that the layers needed to be blended cohesively toward the creation of a singular work, incorporating aspects of each season throughout. I turned to brush tools and layer masks, painting with opacity, changing brush dimensions and density as I went. The technique is tedious and time consuming, and I enjoy it because it’s a challenge.
I haven’t been back to the landscape in over three years. Have a few more trees snapped? Has beech bark disease torn the canopy wide open? If I return, will it even feel like the same place? Perhaps it’s best to move on, finally.
