 For six years at the beginning of the new millennium, Benjamin Swett periodically photographed a particular Callery pear tree on the west side of Manhattan, capturing everything from its blossoms in the spring to its snow-covered branches in the winter. Then “one day in 2008,” as he writes in “Death of a Tree” for the NYR Online, “I drove by and the Callery pear was gone.” Contractors had cleared the way for a proposed suite of buildings that, in the end, mostly went unbuilt. “The tree had, it seemed to me, been cut down for nothing,” Swett observes, and turns to a consideration of New York’s urban forest, “about seven million trees, distributed along streets, highways, and shorelines; in parks and cemeteries; in the backyards of private homes; in genuine forests; and in numerous other places, such as the edges of parking lots.” These trees are a critical part of New York’s ecosystem, and, he argues, as global warming intensifies, it is imperative that the city avoid cutting them down.  Benjamin Swett; photograph by Harry Wilks Swett is a photographer and writer. His work has been exhibited at galleries in New York City and the Hudson Valley, as well as in Central Park, and he has published several photobooks about rural and urban New York and, naturally, trees. His writing has appeared in such venues as Orion magazine, Salmagundi, and Cabinet, and he is the author of The Picture Not Taken: On Life and Photography, from New York Review Books. He also teaches writing at City College in Manhattan and is the senior photographer for the Notion Archaeological Project in Turkey. Last week I wrote Swett to ask him about his favorite trees, photographing nature, and what people can do to help the trees in their lives. Daniel Drake: Your essay is in part inspired by a Callery pear tree on Eleventh Avenue in Chelsea that had become a fixture of your life in the city. Have there been other significant trees in your life, growing up or after the Callery pear was removed? Is there, for that matter, a variety of tree that is your favorite, either for aesthetic or practical reasons? Benjamin Swett: I’m not particularly attached to Callery (or Bradford, as they’re also known) pears as a species; it’s more like there have been particular trees that have stuck with me and remained with me for entirely personal reasons even after they were gone. I’m thinking of a lovely, bent American elm that used to grow on Bruckner Boulevard in the Bronx, shading the cars waiting to cross the Third Avenue Bridge, and of an English elm that used to dominate the southern end of Madison Square Park, where the tables of Shake Shack now spread out. I’m thinking of a London plane tree, which neighbors unaccountably named “Matilda,” that used to stand at the back of the old Ballfield #3 in East River Park and that I photographed many times before it was removed during the current park renovation. And I’m thinking of an ailanthus that grew for many years outside our bedroom window and “provided,” as Katherine, my wife, wrote in a poem after its unexpected removal by a neighbor,
There are living trees that are also special to me—a sugar maple in Sharon, Vermont, that is clearly the mother tree for all the younger maples around it, which I found myself photographing obsessively a few years back while my own mother was dying nearby, and a Japanese pagoda tree in St. Mary’s Park in the Bronx that is somehow, for me, the emotional center of the park. What might you recommend a New Yorker—or a city dweller anywhere—do to best help the trees and forests in their communities? Join a local nonprofit devoted to tree care and advocacy. Every city has them. In New York, Trees New York runs a highly successful program called Citizen Pruners that trains and equips residents to care for their local street trees. The Natural Areas Conservancy studies and advocates and cares for the many acres of forests and wetlands in the city. The Parks Department itself is ultimately responsible for the city’s more than seven million trees, and the three best ways to support the agency are to 1) volunteer in your local park through the Partnerships for Parks program, 2) help keep track of your neighborhood street trees by learning to identify and count them as part of the Trees Count program, and 3) fight for a more reasonable share of the city’s budget to go to the Parks Department by joining with advocacy groups such as New Yorkers for Parks. The most important thing to do for trees in the city right now, though, is to contact your New York City Council representative and the Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice to demand that the city change its tree laws to reduce the number of mature, healthy trees that are unnecessarily cut down each year. One surprising theme in the essay is that you seem fairly agnostic about what kinds of trees—invasive or noninvasive, native or nonnative—are planted in the city, so long as the ones that are planted are not subsequently cut down. Is there a way in which what you call the “distinctive ecosystem” of the urban forest can foster a wider variety of tree species? When replanting, ought city planners try to plant more red maples or American elms, or is it fine—especially now that the city is technically “subtropical”—to plant magnolias or Callery pears? Any new trees planted in the city should be climate-ready, resilient—whatever you want to call it—to make sure, first, that they survive, and, second, that they contribute as much as they can to cooling the city and making it a healthier, better place to live. It would be foolish to advocate, for purely aesthetic or sentimental reasons, for planting trees we know won’t survive as well as others can, or that won’t benefit the city the way others can. What I object to is the false concept that by cutting down a mature, healthy tree, even if its species is considered invasive or nonnative or short-lived, and replacing it with a sapling, you are somehow gaining something over just letting the original tree continue to grow in place for however many more years it has left. How inefficient it is cutting down trees just to replace them rather than leaving trees growing and planting additional ones. What people forget, I think, is that what is short in a tree’s lifetime is long in a human’s, and even if a mature tree has only another ten or twenty years left in it, that is actually a long time in human terms, during which new trees could be planted that would begin to benefit the city before the old one goes. Do you approach photographing a tree differently from photographing, say, architecture or ancient ruins or people? Are there ways in which your approach to these subjects is the same? My one rule in photographing trees is to show the place where the tree meets the ground. Only then can I show the tree as a particular specimen growing in a particular way in a particular place. Just to photograph isolated branches or a trunk—though often beautiful and sometimes unavoidable—turns the tree into an abstraction, an idea of a tree, or an idea of lines or shadows or squiggles, and not a singular living being. Of the different subjects you mention, I’ve been photographing trees the longest, and much of what I’ve learned about photographing trees applies, oddly enough, to architecture, ancient ruins, and even people—questions of lighting, angle, focal length, framing, and parallax distortion. What makes trees easier to photograph than people is that trees are endlessly patient and have not an ounce of vanity. In your essay and in your lovely book The Picture Not Taken, you seem to sometimes write with the same method as you might use to put together a photobook or take a photograph: using a sharp detail to evoke a whole, or letting the absence of some images or words suggest what is not present, or in the closing moments of the remarkable title essay, “The Picture Not Taken,” building a short series of related visual vignettes—including your ambling presence as a photographer—into a statement about something off the page entirely. Do you find that you address writing and photography with a similar temperament? I love what writing and photography can do, whether together or apart. In two of my books, Route 22 and New York City of Trees, I paired photographs and text on facing pages and tried to let the blocks of text express what the paired photographs couldn’t, and vice versa. An essay, whether of pure text, a combination of text and photographs, or just photographs, works as much through what is not directly said as through what is, by exploring a question from many sides and suggesting a more complex meaning or feeling than can be expressed in a single sentence or picture. Even in this essay about the Callery pear, though I made some specific recommendations on how the city could improve its tree laws, I was also trying, through the text and photographs, to get at something less tangible about the presence of trees in a city. Who are some photographers you’ve been enjoying recently? What books have you been reading? I was recently very moved by Rebecca Norris Webb’s A Difficulty Is the Light, a small book of her poems and photographs exploring her grief around the loss of her brother, and by Emmanuel Iduma’s I Am Still With You, a nonfiction book that reads like a novel about the author’s search for information about an uncle lost during the Biafran War. I’ve been reading Taking Manhattan, Russell Shorto’s new book about what actually happened with the Dutch and English in early Manhattan, and on the recommendation of my son recently listened on tape in the car to Yoni Appelbaum’s Stuck, about the degree to which zoning regulations are at the root of so many problems in the US today. Every day I enjoy a new photograph or two by Sven Birkerts on Instagram. And Katherine just gave me Robert Macfarlane’s new book about rivers, Is a River Alive?, which I hope is going to help me expand my thinking about trees. More by Benjamin Swett at nybooks.com Death of a TreeNew York City’s mature trees have so many advantages that nothing can substitute for just leaving them where they are. What would it take to preserve them? For everything else we’ve been publishing, visit the Review’s website. And let us know what you think: send your comments to editor@nybooks.com; we do write back.  Save $168 on an inspired pairing! |
sábado, 2 de agosto de 2025
The Forest and the Trees
Suscribirse a:
Enviar comentarios (Atom)
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario