George Haas: Forcing Nature - Trees in Los Angeles

Hardcover | 36.68 x 2.03 x 28.24 cm | 96 pp

Bunker Hill Publishing | 2006 | 9781593730505

When most people think of Los Angeles, a sprawling city steeped in diversity and multi-culturalism, trees are rarely the first things to spring to mind. But the city landscape is virtually defined by its trees - all 150 officially approved varieties.

 Although Angelinos take pride in their trees, they also can take them for granted. Not so for George Haas. If passers-by notice a Date Palm through the corner of their eyes, Haas is more apt to focus on it and redefine the world by shifting attention from the activity of human beings to the activity of trees. Not merely content to capture images through his lens, however, Haas as artist and philosopher bends, stretches, and blurs reality into what we perceive it to be, transforming the raw data of the world into his personal point of view.

In the 80 images throughout this book, Haas has forced Nature to do his bidding. Still, Haas's trees are portraits of Los Angeles in all its complexity and quirkiness, and his views of individual trees reveal much about their surroundings and the humans with whom they share their habitat. For Haas, L.A. - like the entire world - is a Garden of Eden, replete with bountiful flora and fauna and, of course, danger. Living in an environment moulded by and for humans, each tree precariously presides in a fearful symmetry among the highways, telephone poles, and nondescript buildings. Forcing Nature is a testament to Haas as a photographer, but also as an architect, visionary, prankster, ecologist, and, in his method of reproduction, something of an alchemist.