I began to photograph trees. My attention was particularly drawn to the ways they had accommodated themselves to the urban environment, or the ways they had been pressed into making such accommodation. Everything in tree life, I came to feel, was a negotiation made visible. On many more trees than I had noticed before, I saw evidence of pruning, trimming, thinning, pollarding, supplemental support and coerced tropism. Trees grew out of concrete, next to fences, through fences. They seemed to be fighting silent battles or suffering indignities, appeared to emanate strain, stress and heroic endurance. Such twists and torsions, such violent constraint and wild entanglement, when I noticed them in a young beech that had entwined itself around a utility pole on Cleveland Street, just south of Broadway, brought my mind back to the Laocoön sculptures. The interlaced branches were now arms, now serpents. The beech was a tragic hero, petrified. I made many pictures of such trees, and each time, some analogy to art would impress itself on me, the more so because of the universally locked museum doors. The dramatic stage, as it were, was now out on the streets: here was a spiky shrub as in Dürer’s Quarry, here a pyramidal arrangement of diagonals as in David’s Oath of the Horatii.

Rembrandt was not alone in the Dutch Golden Age in depicting the landscape with fidelity to observed detail while at the same time imbuing it with the pervasive presence of the numinous