I have a long-standing project I began years ago, a mission to photograph my favourite trees. Sadly, I am nowhere near finished, in fact by it’s very nature I probably never will reach completion. One thing it does do though, is really get me thinking. How can I make my work original and capture the subject with beauty and simplicity? One series of shots from photographer Abbas Kiarostami is etched in my mind as a kind of benchmark.
The work featured here is from the series “Trees in Snow”. Kiarostami is an Iranian photographer. He is super-talented and may be better known to many of you as an award-winning film-maker; “The Wind Will Carry Us” (1999), “A Taste of Cherry” (1997) and “Ten” (2002) are three from his impressive archive. He wrote some words to introduce this series at the V&A, London in 2005.
“Snow descends from
the black clouds
with the whiteness of snow”
The “Trees in Snow” images were borne out of Kiarostami’s long, solitary walks to search for film sets, sometimes covering thousands of miles in the Iranian landscape. Photographing these landscapes allowed him a spontaneous immersion in nature. When travelling alone, he sees his camera as a way of sharing moments which would be torturous if not preserved. The scenes became the equivalent of emotional states and the trees almost human, echoing the saying of the Islamic mystic Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi (born 1165 died 1240): ‘the tree is the sister of man’.
scatterdrum is a personal blog by Gill Moore. Gill is a professional photographer based in Manchester in England.
She works for commercial and editorial clients together with shooting personal projects. This side of her work often includes exhibiting, publishing and working with like-minded collaborators on an environmental theme.
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