Blued Tree with Green Foliage, Cape Cod, Massachusetts Possibly 1978 - 1979

This black and white photograph, taken by Harry Callahan at Cape Cod, shows a dense thicket of trees and shrubbery, shot from above. The scene is a tangle of branches, and I wonder if Callahan was thinking about the way nature itself paints, throwing lines around with wild abandon. There’s something about the close-up perspective that flattens the image and makes me think about the surface of a canvas. Maybe he was thinking about how to create depth. It’s hard to know what was on his mind when he made this work, but what strikes me is how the shapes of the foliage, rendered in shades of grey, create an intricate dance of light and shadow. Callahan was really onto something here, showing us the world in a way we might not have seen it before. And that’s what art is all about, isn’t it?