Olmsted TreesPhotographs by Stanley Greenberg, with contributions by Tom Avermaete, Kevin Baker, Mindy Thompson Fullilove
Hirmer Publishers, August 2022
Hardcover | 9 x 11 inches | 160 pages | 100 illustrations | German/English | ISBN: 9783777438573
PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION:
Central Park in New York, the Emerald Necklace in Boston, park systems in Chicago, Milwaukee, Buffalo, Rochester and Louisville – trees have been essential elements of all of Olmsted’s park designs. New York-based photographer Stanley Greenberg pays tribute to them with his portrait series of these beautiful and dignified giants. Three essays by renowned experts on history, sociology and landscape architecture complement the narrative and present an interdisciplinary vision on Olmsted’s achievement.
Stanley Greenberg’s work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and has published several books of photography.
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Frederick Law Olmsted was born in April 1822 and died in August 1903. The multifaceted journalist, social critic, farmer, and public administrator is best known as a landscape architect — the most influential landscape architect in the United States, if not the world. Central Park, which he and Calvert Vaux designed and
won a competition for in 1858, is Olmsted's first and most famous landscape: 843 acres in the middle of Manhattan. If one wants to experience an Olmsted, Central Park is the best and most obvious place to visit, especially considering it is his oldest creation and is therefore home to the oldest trees planted in line with his plans. Stanley Greenberg's
Olmsted Trees, one of the many books released this year on the
bicentennial of Olmsted's birth, presents dozens of black-and-white photos of trees in the public parks designed by Olmsted, accompanied by texts by Kevin Baker, Mindy Thompson Fullilove, and Tom Avermaete.
If there is one photographer ready made for the documentation of trees in Olmsted's parks, it's
Stanley Greenberg. For one, he lives in Brooklyn, literally across the street from Prospect Park, another Olmsted and Vaux creation and one that is arguably more beautiful and more
"perfect" than Central Park. Greenberg's past books have similarly focused on singular subjects:
New York's water works,
New York's underground infrastructure, and
buildings under construction, among others. His previous book,
Springs And Wells of Manhattan and the Bronx, revisited a nearly
100-year-old book about the "springs and wells that were disappearing as the city grew and as Croton water reached more residents." Unlike
Springs and Wells and
Codex New York: Typologies of the City,
which I reviewed a few years ago, most of Greenberg's books use black-and-white photography to focus the viewer's attention on the form, light, and texture of his subjects.
Black and white may seem like an odd choice for a book of trees. At first flip, I found myself imagining what the trees actually look like in color, but the more I got through the book the more I realized that the trees Greenberg selected to photograph have character that would be diminished if the trees and their surroundings were in color. The combination of the black-and-white palette and the framing of the trees, many in close up, accentuate the bark, the knots, the growths, the branching and other characteristics of the oldest trees in Olmsted's parks in and beyond New York. Some of the trees are gnarly, almost like alien creatures rather than trees, and a few incorporate rods and walls that I assume are there to help the trees stand stably. No explanation is given with each photograph, outside of the tree species (in Latin, German, and English), the location of the park, and the year Greenberg snapped the photo.
The texts by Kevin Baker, Mindy Thompson Fullilove, and Tom Avermaete in the beginning, middle, and end of Greenberg's photos provide, respectively, an introduction to the photographs, a personal essay on an Olmsted park, and a brief overview of Olmsted's most notable park (Central Park) and park system (Boston's Emerald Necklace). These contributions could have been stronger, given that Fullilove's essay focuses on a park designed by Olmsted Jr., not the father whose trees are the subject of the book (the parks by Olmsted Sr. are located in a map at the back of the book, seen below). Also, while Avermaete's essay commendably focuses on two important Olmsted landscapes, I was bothered by the incorrect assertion that "the site of Central Park had been reserved since 1811 in the so-called Commissioners' Plan"; the park is nowhere to be found
in the original plan, and the park has actually been described as
"the single largest change in the 1811 plan." With that statement, I couldn't help wonder if other facts in Avermaete's essay should be questioned.
My quibbles over the essays are minor in a book of photography — the focus in
Olmsted Trees is on Greenberg's photographs, after all. The photographs are beautiful, even though the extent of the trees one sees are fractional: close-ups of trunks are in abundance over full views with their canopies. This makes sense given the ages of the trees and their large sizes, but, as mentioned above, there is so much character on display at the bases of the old trees that I imagine it was hard for Greenberg to resist focusing on them. In this book, it is hard for us to resist the same.
FOR FURTHER READING:
