The Congregation Story

I was staying with a friend in the Shenandoah Valley, in West Virginia. The day before I arrived, he had mowed the lawn around a dead tree standing alone in his field. When I first saw it, it was close to noon. Something about it stopped me, but I knew immediately it wasn’t the moment. The light was wrong, uninteresting.

I couldn't stop thinking about it. That night I looked up what time the sun would rise the next morning, and decided to find out if there was something there or not. I woke up at 4:30 am and walked out into the field. The sun rose almost exactly behind the tree.

I think about that image often, and not just because of how it was made. The year before, there had been an unusually warm day in December, in New York. I remember how happy everyone around me was to catch a break from the cold. Nobody seemed to think about what that kind of warmth, in December, actually meant. The only thing that mattered was that it was beautiful outside.

Everything in this photograph is, technically, nature. But it isn't the nature we need to survive. It's a lawn, mowed the night before, with a dead tree standing in the middle of it. It's already been touched, already altered, already tamed into something presentable. That's what makes it dangerous in the same way the warm December day was dangerous. The beauty is real. It just isn't telling you the whole truth, unless you stay long enough to ask what you're actually looking at.

I don't think beauty is decoration. I think it's one of the only honest languages we have left, and like any language, it can tell the truth or it can hide it. This image, to me, does both at once. It depends on how long you're willing to look.