Falling Tree #24, 2009, is part of Oregon photographer David Paul Bayles' Falling Forest collection, which captured the energy and stillness created by loggers felling trees.
Visitors at Middle Tennessee State University’s Baldwin Photographic Gallery can see both the forests and the trees—and the people who work and live amid them—in a new exhibit focusing on photographer David Paul Bayles’ images.
The exhibit—Still, Trees—will be on display through Thursday, March 17, in Room 269 of the university’s Bragg Media and Entertainment Building.
Bayles is currently in a residency at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest near Blue River, Oregon, and is capturing new images of forests and other landscapes, including documenting floods, fires and other disasters, to show how the earth survives.
A resident of Philomath, Oregon, Bayles has been collaborating with the U.S. Forest Service to document the Holiday Farm Fire, a devastating Labor Day 2020 wildfire near Eugene, Oregon, that destroyed more than 173,000 acres of private and public lands, including portions of the Willamette National Forest.
A former logger in the Sierra Nevada mountains who grew to embrace environmentalism, Bayles often focuses his work on how human pursuits and the needs of the forests can collide, sometimes coexist, and occasionally find harmony.
Raul Mora Avalos, a hook tender on a high-lead logging operation, pauses during his work. Photo by David Paul Bayles
His photos have been on the covers of both academic and commercial magazines, including Oregon Arts Watch, Commonweal, and Earth Surface Processes and Landforms: The Journal of the British Society for Geomorphology.
Bayles, the author of the 2003 book Urban Forest: Images of Trees in the Human Landscape, is working on a second book. More information about Bayles’ work is available at davidpaulbayles.com.
The Baldwin Gallery is located at the top of the stairwell in the Bragg Building’s interior courtyard.
Guests can arrange public tours by contacting gallery curator Shannon Randol at shannon.randol@mtsu.edu. The gallery is open from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. weekdays when MTSU classes are in session.
For more information about the gallery, visit baldwinphotogallery.com.
