Landscape for tree-rings

I have long photographed trees, like landscape characters, but in Landscape for tree-rings, I decide to look for the
landscape inside the tree. I even abandon the use of the camera, making trees, their bark, their wounds cut in the
flesh, the very substance of my photographs. The wood material is therefore both subject and medium.
I work with the tree itself, as to enter into its flesh where are engraved the traits of "its growth, its accidents, its
outgrowths and, even, the circumstances of its death. » Georges Didi-Huberman. La demeure, la souche, apparentements
de l'artiste, 1999
Thus, there is first the physical contact of the paper on the wood. A first image is produced by rubbing the edge of a
cut tree with burnt wood. This print is then used as a negative and put in contact with the photographic paper under
the enlarger lamp. A link is made with photography since wood is also the basic element in the production of paper.

The photogram is the witness of the existence of the tree, the memory of its growth. The paradox lies in the fact that
we observe life in the immobility of the tree stump itself.
These 1-scale photograms are not faithful prints since the hand lets itself be guided by such or such relief, it presses,
avoids or accentuates a hole, a crack, a fold ... Because of the fact that the tree has been cut down by the hand of the
man and hismachines, the cutting of the trunk damaged the regularity of its concentric circles. The growth rings are
like the fingerprint of an encounter between the tree and man, in a trace of an intimate and collective crime that
questions the state of the anthropological relationship with nature.

These photograms therefore become landscapes or visual maps «by the inside» of the existence of a living being, a tree
that is no longer an object lost in the landscape, but the origin of the landscape, the landscape internalized.

©Cynthia Charpentreau