Join us on June 16 at 2:00 in the Valley Library’s Willamette Rooms for a wonderful talk by Artist and Independent Scholar Melody Owen.
Her talk “Poetic dendrochronology and human/tree portraiture in historical photographs from the Pacific Northwest” will be an exploration of human/tree portraiture in early 20th century photography culled from the Gerald W. Williams Collection. This genre includes photographs usually taken to emphasize the tree’s grand majesty, beauty, strangeness and/or size compared to the relative smallness of a person, as well as those that show off the human’s bravado and skills in cutting them down.
The title is in reference to the rings inside a tree’s trunk that indicate its age and also to the type of picture in which people hold hands and form a ring around a tree, sometimes to show its size and sometimes to protect it.