Northern California Coast Redwoods

More About the Image:

Northern California Coast Redwoods was made later in Ansel’s career near Bull Creek Flat in Humboldt County, California, during a commission with the Redwood Empire Association.  The project was intended to promote the majesty of the forests, as well as tourism to the area.  The Coastal Redwoods are the tallest living trees on Earth, and as such, hard to include in a single photograph from a close perspective.  Ansel has emphasized this famous height of the trees by positioning himself in near proximity to the trunks.  Cropping out the canopy of Redwood crowns, the height of the trees is all of a sudden left up to our imaginations, their luminous trunks visually advancing towards us as if emerging out from the recesses of an obscure, mythological land.  The density of the background shadows likewise proposes a deep forest of immeasurable geographic scope.  Therefore, even though we are presented with an image that seems relatively two-dimensional, the world in which the image exists is immense, expanding beyond the frame in every direction.  Ansel would include this image in his Portfolio 4 about which he wrote, ‘In some [images], the essences of light and space dominate [. . .] and the luminous insistence of growing things.  Shape of nature, transformed into what the artist calls forms by the controlled eye and perceptive spirit, are presented here as the equivalents of experience.’ (P pg. undesignated)  At the end of his life, Ansel communicated the significance of this image by including it as one of the variants in his last major project, The Museum Set.