A 1:2 vertical photograph of a lone bobby socks tree on the sinter flats at Yellowstone, Wyoming, available as a limited edition print in three sizes.
In the geothermal basins of Yellowstone, the groundwater carries dissolved silica, and the lodgepole pines growing too near it draw that water up through their roots. The silica collects in the lower trunk. It turns the wood white, and it kills the tree. It also hardens what it fills, slowing the decay that would otherwise bring the trunk down before long. The white at the bottom of this one is both the cause of death and the reason it is still upright.
I came across it in summer, walking one of the paths out toward the pools on a clear day, and stopped because it was the only thing standing.
There is a habit of mind that sorts the world into what preserves and what destroys, and it works nearly everywhere. It does not work here. One process did both. The tree drew the water up because that is what a tree does, with no way to tell the water that feeds it from the water that does not, and the mineral that ended it is the reason it has not fallen. Standing in front of that, the sorting simply stops. Not a tragedy, not a triumph. Only what happened. There is an unexpected quiet in meeting something that does not need to be filed under either.
One is that trunk on the flats, still standing on the thing that ended it.
Some things ask nothing of you, and that turns out to be the rarest thing a picture can offer. I wrote about it in When Your Mind Needs to Rest.
Photographed in a geothermal basin in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, in summer. This is a single frame image in color. The subject is a dead lodgepole pine, Pinus contorta, of the kind known in Yellowstone as a bobby socks tree. Trees growing at the edge of hydrothermal runoff draw silica-rich water up through their roots; the silica accumulates in the lower trunk, turning it white, eventually killing the tree, and hardening the wood so that it resists decay and remains standing long after death. The frame holds a single trunk on open sinter flats, with steam from the basin softening the horizon behind it. That steam is also why the light reads as it does here, flattening the distance and holding the whole photograph in a narrow, pale range with almost no shadow in it. Presented as a vertical print, offered as an archival limited edition from 20 by 40 inches to 40 by 80 inches on acrylic, metal, or archival paper.
A tall photograph with almost nothing in it does something a full one cannot. It gives a wall some air.
One to two is a decisively vertical proportion, twice as tall as it is wide, and it behaves unlike anything else in the collection. Most rooms are built on horizontals. Countertops, sofa backs, windowsills, the line where the wall meets the floor. A tall frame cuts across all of it, and that interruption is the point. Where a panorama settles into a room and extends it sideways, a shape this narrow stops the eye and sends it up. It also fits where nothing else will: a chimney breast, the pier between two windows, a stairwell, a narrow entry, the end of a hall. It does not need a long run of wall. It needs height, and about half as much width as it has of that.
Here the shape is the subject. A single trunk runs almost the full height of the frame with sky on either side of it, so the proportion is not a container for the composition, it is the composition. On a wall that reads as an object rather than as a view, closer to a piece of sculpture than to a window, and it holds that reading from any distance. It is also very nearly empty. Something over half the frame is pale sky and haze with nothing in it at all, and that emptiness is what makes the piece restful in a crowded room. It introduces a large area where nothing is happening, which does more for a busy wall than another object would.
The tonal weight is what sets this one apart. It is the lightest photograph in the collection by a wide margin, running from pale blue sky through grey haze to warm sand, with almost no shadow anywhere in it and nothing approaching black. That makes it behave like a light object on a wall rather than a dark one. It brightens a room instead of anchoring it, it sits comfortably on a pale wall without disappearing, and against a dark wall it becomes a source of light rather than a hole in the surface. The color is quiet enough to place almost anywhere: cool blue above, warm sand below, both at low saturation, so it agrees with a cool room and a warm one at the same time. What it rewards most is daylight and a wall with nothing else on it.
Related Reading: The Quiet Ones
All three sizes shown to scale, aligned left and sharing a center line.
This photograph is offered in three sizes and four presentations, from $1,125 to $13,400. Full pricing across all sizes and presentations.
Each edition closes permanently once filled.
Not sure which size the room calls for, or want dimensions not listed here? Sizes beyond 40 × 80 are available on request and ship crated by freight. That conversation is welcome before an order is placed. Start that conversation and I will answer within one business day.
At one to two, the Intimate size is twenty inches across and forty inches tall. That is already a substantial piece on a wall, because height reads as presence in a way width does not, and forty inches of it will hold a narrow wall on its own. This photograph also asks less of scale than most, because its structure is one vertical line against an empty field and that survives any size. What you give up is the trunk's surface. At forty inches tall the wood reads as a grey line with a white foot, and the checking, the broken limb stubs, and the grain that make it a specific tree rather than a post are compressed away. The Collected at thirty by sixty brings them back. The Statement at forty by eighty gives the trunk something close to its own scale, which is the point of it. If you are weighing a size against a specific wall, choosing the right print size covers the measurements and the viewing distances in more detail.
The trunk stops being a shape and becomes a surface. At twenty by forty it reads as a pale vertical line. At forty by eighty the weathering resolves: deep vertical checking running the length of the wood, the broken stubs where limbs came off, the twist in the grain where it has dried and opened, and the ragged crown where the top finally went. The transition at the base is the part worth having large. The grey wood does not stop and the white start; the silica works up through the grain in a gradient, warmer at the boundary, and you can see where the mineral got to and where it did not. That is the whole argument of the photograph made visible, and it is only visible at scale. Why scale matters covers what happens perceptually when a landscape reaches the size where the eye has to travel across it.
Almost any of them, and it is the easiest piece in the collection to place. This is the lightest photograph here by a wide margin, running from pale blue sky through grey haze to warm sand, with almost no shadow anywhere in it. It brightens a room rather than anchoring one, which is the opposite of most work at this scale. On a pale wall it sits in the same register without disappearing, since the trunk gives it a hard vertical to hold the eye. On a dark wall it reads as a source of light. The color asks nothing: cool above, warm below, both at low saturation, so it agrees with a cool scheme and a warm one at once. What it rewards most is daylight and a wall with nothing else on it, since more than half the frame is empty and that emptiness needs room around it to read as calm rather than as a gap.
Every work ships insured and arrives with a signed certificate of authenticity.
If a piece is damaged in transit, the choice of replacement is always yours, and your edition number stays with you.
Production time runs 2 to 3 weeks for metal, 3 to 4 weeks for acrylic and paper, and 5 to 6 weeks for framed work.
Collector Edition of 25 · Lumachrome TruLife Acrylic · Handcrafted Italian Frame
TruLife acrylic in a handcrafted Italian frame with a linen liner chosen for the image. Frame series, finish, and liner are settled with you after the order, and production begins from there. The frame and liner add about fourteen inches to the finished dimensions, worth allowing for when planning placement.
Signature Edition of 50 · Lumachrome TruLife Acrylic · Gallery Float Mount
Face-mounted to TruLife acrylic and floated approximately one inch from the wall, with no frame to mediate between the image and the room. UV-resistant, anti-reflective, and scratch-resistant, with a lifetime guarantee against fading.
Signature Edition of 50 · ChromaLuxe Metal Print · Gallery Float Mount
Color infused into the aluminum panel itself, floated from the wall on a concealed system. Where acrylic produces luminosity, metal produces clarity. Exceptional fade resistance with no glazing or coating required.
Fine Art Edition of 100 · Hahnemühle Baryta Fine Art Paper
Printed without acrylic, so light meets the paper surface directly. Highlights stay luminous, shadows keep their nuance, and the surface has a tactile quality the other presentations approach differently. The understated choice, and the traditional one.
Complimentary shipping within the continental United States. International collector shipping available upon request.
Still deciding
Designing for Stillness
A guide to choosing art for restorative spaces
How to tell whether an image will still hold you in a year, how scale changes what a photograph does in a room, and how to match a piece to the work a room actually performs. It cites the research it draws on, and it is equally clear about where that research stops. About ten minutes to read.