A Convergence
of Convergences:
A Contest.
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For more information
about this contest,
click here.
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Lee Friedlander's
Visionary Trees:
An Addendum to
the Last Chapters of Everything That Rises.
By Lawrence Weschler
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The other day I was visiting the remarkable Lee Friedlander show currently up at the Metropolitan, the one featuring his vantages of trees and landscapes in the parks of Frederick Law Olmsted—one astonishingly fresh and revelatory vantage after another—when I came upon this one in particular:
Readers of the final chapters in Everything That Rises will perhaps anticipate the sorts of chords this image immediately started setting off in me—trees, neurons, dendrites, indeed ...
And cameras. For as we saw there, to recapitulate, trees, mysteriously, were the preferred subject of depiction in early diagrams of camera obscuras.
Which in turn was why the artist Rodney Graham conceived of a tree, cast upside down as it would be in a traditional camera obscura, as the focal point for his exhibit ...
Except that it went deeper than that. Because, as we also saw (and I use the term advisedly), the workings of the camera obscura in turn became a model for the workings of the eye, as in this antique diagram:
Which in turn suggested for us—and I would here hazard the thought that it was doing the same for contemporary camera-man Friedlander that day in the park—the notion that trees, in their doubledness (the tree above, the roots below), recapitulate the way light itself enters our eyes.
Friedlander's photo seems to partake of both suggestions: the tree's shadow reading, on the one hand, as the tree's roots—but also (note the conspicuous curvature of the horizon line) the tree itself reading as light rays converging on an eye-pupil (say, for the sake of argument, our own eye's pupil as we gaze upon the image), with its shadow reading as those rays passing through the pupil and fanning out across the interior of the eyeball.
The latter suggestion, for that matter, recalls the way capillaries, blood vessels, likewise course about the eyeball:
Thus, Friedlander's becomes a positively visionary tree!
Which in turn reminds me of some of Ruth Asawa's similarly uncanny tied-wire sculptures, on view not that long ago at the Japan Society in New York, and memorialized in the show's catalog (The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air):
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OTHER WINNERS.
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1. Evolving, Evolved by Charlie Hopper
2. Primal Forces, Basic Colors by Andy Hunter
3. The End of the Beginning by Holly Dunsworth
Intermezzo by Lawrence Weschler
4. This Is Not an Ad by Jimmy Chen
5. Catskills Vagina by Dan Clem
6. The Antipodes by Chris Zic
7. Self-Made Constriction by Sam Gaskin
8. We Are the Son by Danny Erker
9. Painfully Unaware by Dan Park
10. Gutshot by Jason Torchinsky
Weschler's Second Interlude
11. Love and War by Kim Wood
12. Inside and Out There by Lena Webb
13. The March by Emily Marvosh
14. Feminine Divine Triptych by Margit Christenson
15. Time's Deliberate Convergence by Steve Denyszyn
16. A Rousseau/Hirshfield Convergence by Adam Webb
Beirut/Warsaw by Lawrence Weschler
17. Clothesline Raising Over Carlisle, Indiana by Charlie Hopper
Carnival of Convergences
Weschler's Fourth Interlude
Aftersquib to the Foregoing
18. Pelvises All the Way Down by John Peter Rickgauer
19. Ovary Night? by Maya Muñoz
20. Christ in Space by Jonathan Shipley
A Pair of Convergences Off of Tina Barney
Another Carnival of Convergences
21. Moral Confusion: Iraq, Munich, and Vietnam by Donald Rumsfeld
22. Seeing the Tree for the Forest by Walter Murch
An Addendum to the Foregoing, and a Visitor Challenge
23, 24, and 25. Far Out by Michael Benson, Brian Christian, and Walter Murch
26. Jewish Bunk Beds by Monica S. Bland
Those Damn Swedish Trees, Take 3: Convergence of the Blogs
27. Degenerate Boogie-Woogie by Lisa Lee
Carnival of Convergences No. 3
28. Sand and Moon by Alison Cornyn
Actaeon: An Ovidian Impromptu by Lawrence Weschler
29 and 30. Hoods and Veils by Vero Testa and Lauren Redniss
The Onion/Bickle Convergence by Lawrence Weschler
31. The Lone Figure Against the Armored Swarm by Michele Siegel
32. Muscle and Flow by Benjamin R. Cohen
An Addendum to the Foregoing: Cities, Brains, Orchestras by Lawrence Weschler
Saint and Princess by Lawrence Weschler
Beauty Queen and Baghdad Hummer by Lawrence Weschler
Carnival of Convergences No. 4
Laughing, Clapping, Constantly Forgetting: A Trill of Readerly Associations by Lawrence Weschler
33. Lithographica by R.A. Villanueva
34. Papal Fire (Papa Lux) by Nick Feia
Addendum to "Laughing, Clapping ..." and, More Specifically, to the Stalinist-Applause Anecdote by Lawrence Weschler
35. Disseminations: Internet, Dandelions, Flight Paths by Sarah Daegling
36. Black and White and in Color by Walter Murch
Carnival of Convergences No. 5
Lee Friedlander's Visionary Trees: An Addendum to the Last Chapters of Everything That Rises by Lawrence Weschler
37. Shipwrecked Desperation by Charles Mudede via Matt Haber
38. Life Forms by Ariel Winter
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