Knotwilg c. 1900 - 1940

Richard Tepe made this photograph of a pollard willow, sometime in the late 19th or early 20th century. It looks like a soft, grayish drawing, really, and it reminds me that the first photographers were often painters. They made landscapes or portraits, just as they always had, but they used light and chemicals instead of paint. I can imagine Tepe setting up his camera and tripod, choosing the right exposure, trying to capture the way the light hits the tree. Did he see it as a portrait, or a study of form? Maybe he was inspired by the way the tree seemed to grow right out of the water, with its knobby trunk and delicate branches reaching up to the sky. Like a painting, a photograph is never really ‘real’—it’s always a kind of translation, a way of seeing the world that’s shaped by the artist’s choices, and also by chance. It's an invitation to slow down and really look.