Between 1998 and 2004, James and his team crisscrossed America, from Key West to the Pacific Northwest, from New England to Arizona, paying visual homage to 92 specimens of 47 different tree species. Most of his subjects had been designated “champions”—the largest individuals of their species, according to a measurement system used by the National Register of Big Trees. Many were relics of the deforestation that had swept the continent during European colonization, agricultural development, and industrialization.
These portraits deliver an antidote to the amnesia of the Anthropocene, when, as centuries pass and humans keep altering nature, we lose the memory of what natural nature actually was. They were initially published in Tree: A New Vision of the American Forest (2004).
Inspired by the techniques he used to make portraits of animals, James initially winched up huge fabric backdrops behind the trees. Before long, he moved to multi-frame treatments, which evoked how enormous some of the trees were and how the human eye moved across space during encounters with them.
Collaborating with an athletic team of tree scientists, James developed an innovative—albeit hazardous—technique for climbing and rappelling down coast redwood and giant sequoia, the tallest and largest trees in the world, respectively. He photographed them in hundreds of sequential frames, then constructed mosaics to create never-before-seen portraits of these arboreal personalities. This innovation broke conceptual ground that was soon followed by other photographers.
