Contesting plant-blindness with photography: Michael “Nick” Nichols’s portrait of a giant sequoia

Abstract

Michael “Nick” Nichols’s 2012 portrait of the 3200-year old, 247-foot tall giant sequoia named the President, the second largest tree known, for National Geographic, comprised of 126 separate photographs which have been digitally combined to make one image, challenges cultural plant-blindness and confronts the ethics of representation of plants, in particular trees, when the images are printed on plant-based paper. Neither art nor scientific illustration, the photojournalistic image draws connections between trees and photography, and both individualizes the tree and metaphorically references the biocommunity in which it participates. Nichols’s approach to the portrait, which recognized the intimacy between himself, his team, and the tree, draws attention to plant sentience. The materiality of the image, published as a fold-out poster printed on paper that includes tree content, has the capacity to alert the viewer to the ethics of plant representation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The largest sequoia is the General Sherman, 275’. Quammen, “Climbing.” While my paper focuses on a photograph in National Geographic, and the journal has a history of supporting environmentalism and preservation, as well as excellent photography, I do not intend to uncritically embrace it. It has a complex history of colonialist presentation of cultures outside the west (see, for example, Lutz and Collins.) Furthermore, when it was sold to Rupert Murdoch in 2015, several of its long-term staff photographers were let go. See Gajanan. It was sold to Disney in March 2019. I was unable to obtain permission to reproduce the photograph for this article, but it is widely available online, as are copies of the National Geographic issue in which it was published. Because its reproduction would be completely different from its original poster format, this is perhaps fitting.

2. Quammen, “Climbing,” 27, 36.

3. Borunda, “California’s sequoias.” However, in 2020 the Castle Fire destroyed as much as ten percent of these trees. See Herrera, “‘Mind-blowing.’”

4. Cook and Jenshel, Wise Trees, 172.

5. Ibid.

6. Quammen, “Climbing,” 35, 40. Redwoods, by contrast, were, and are, logged, with the wood of some centuries-old trees ending up used in disposable diapers; see Caufield, “The Ancient Forest,” 79.

7. Bourne, “Redwoods: The Super Trees.” For a fantastic layman’s introduction to Sillett’s work, see Preston, “Climbing the Redwoods.”

8. Harris, Wild Life, 283.

9. Quammen interview with Nichols, June, 2013. I was present at the actual interview, and transcribed this passage from a video recording. The full recording of this video was available on the Look3 website until Look3 closed. Before that time, I downloaded the video, which is apparently no longer available online. Video, 6:17–25.

10. See note 8 above.

11. Harris, Wild Life, 284–5.

12. Wandersee and Schussler, “Preventing Plant Blindness,” 82, 84.

13. Ibid., 82.

14. Wandersee and Schussler, “Preventing Plant Blindness,” 82, citing R.D. Zakia, Perception and Imaging (Boston: Focal Press, 1997).

15. Nash, “Time for Collaboration.”

16. See Mavor, “Happiness.”

17. Stern, Eugenic Nation, 103. I would like to thank Keri Watson, whose essay, “Building the World of Tomorrow: Disability, Eugenics, and Sculpture at the 1939 New York World’s Fair,” to be published in Disability and Art History from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century, ed. Ann Millett-Gallant and Elizabeth Howie (London and New York, Routledge, to be published in 2012), introduced me to the relationship between eugenics and the great trees.

18. Stern, Eugenic Nation, 103.

19. Stern, Eugenic Nation, 103. She cites Merriam, “Living Link in History,” 4; Muir, “Save the Redwoods,” 1–4. Muir’s racism has finally been addressed quite recently by the Sierra Club; see Fears and Mufson, “Liberal, progressive — and racist?”

20. Stern, Eugenic Nation, 105.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid.

23. Cook and Jenshel, Wise Trees, 184.

24. Caufield, “Ancient Forests,” 74–75.

25. Berkeley, Works of George Berkeley, 2:22–23. See also Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/berkeley/.

26. Mancuso and Viola, Brilliant Green, 4.

27. Ibid., 3–4.

28. Wandersee and Schussler, “Preventing Plant-Blindness,” 84.

29. Marder, “Plant-Thinking,” 10.

30. Ibid., 3–4.

31. Ibid., 8.

32. Ibid., 4.

33. Watkins, Trees in Art, 7.

34. Ibid., 8.

35. A very incomplete list includes collaborators Diane Cook and Len Jenshel, Rachel Sussman, Mitch Epstein, David Reinfeld, Laurie Lambrecht, Vladimir Frumin, and Tacita Dean.

36. In addition to pigments made from plant materials, or the use of wood panels or cotton or linen canvas for support, artists have experimented with using plants’ light-sensitivity to create photographic images: Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey, who use grass as a light-sensitive medium.Barnes, “Photos on the Grass,” 66–71. Alice Cazenave and Binh Dahn print images on leaves, using the leaves’ own chlorophyll; Beaumont-Thomas, “Alice Cazenave’s best photograph.”

37. Harris, Wild Life, 283.

38. Harris, Wild Life, 292, citing direct communication with Quammen.

39. Nichols was not the first photographer to approach tree photography this way; James Balog, who also worked with Sillett and Campbell-Spickler, pioneered the mutlti-photograph approach, although he was using hand-held cameras instead of those mounted on dollies, for his book Tree: A New Vision of the American Forest.

40. Harris, Wild Life, 286–7.

41. The tree was originally named the Warren Harding Tree. “Giant redwood dedicated to memory of late president,” National Lumber Bulletin, 7 September 1923, 7.

42. Harris, Wild Life, 289–90.

43. Ibid., 289.

44. Quammen, Look3 interview, video, 1:14:20.

45. Quammen, “Climbing,” 40.

46. Harris, Wild Life, 291, citing “Explorers Bio: Stephen Sillett.”

47. Harris, Wild Life, 291.

48. Quammen, “Climbing,” 34.

49. Ibid., 40.

50. Marder, Plant-Thinking,12.

51. Quammen interview with Nichols, video, 1:14:42–15:25.

52. Quammen, “Climbing,” 41.

53. Gibson “Interview,” 29.

54. Kurlansky, Paper, 252.

55. Ibid., 253.

56. Geman, Agricultural Finance, 156.

57. Mandibo, “Recycled paper for magazines?”

58. Aloi, Why Look at Plants, xx.

59. Ibid., 33.

60. Gibson, “Interview,” 32.

61. Myers, “Planthroposcene,” 299.

62. Myers, “Planthroposcene,” 300, italics in original.

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Elizabeth Howie

Elizabeth Howie, Professor of Art History Elizabeth Howie has taught at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, South Carolina, since 2008. She received her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2007. Publications include: “The Dandy Victorian: Yinka Shonibare’s Allegory of Disability and Passing,” in Disability and Art History (Routledge, 2016) coedited with Ann Millett-Gallant; “Indulgence and Refusal: Cuteness, Asceticism, and the Aestheticization of Desire,” in The Retro-Futurism of Cuteness (Punctum, 2017) coedited by Jen Boyle and Wan-Chuan Kao.