Untitled (female graduates planting tree) c. 1950

This is a black and white photograph by Robert Burian of female graduates planting a tree. The photographic image is a garden of ghostly delights. It feels like it has been dug up, upturned, and replanted in another dimension. The graduates in their gowns and mortar boards are like rows of standing stones, their pale robes shimmering against the darker backdrop. What might it have been like to be Burian at that moment? What inspired him to invert the tones and turn the scene into something so strange and magical? Was he commenting on the symbolic act of planting a tree, suggesting an inverted relationship between growth and knowledge? The photograph has a dreamlike quality, as if the boundaries between the real and the surreal have blurred. The graduates are forever immortalized, planting the seed of hope for the future.