David Paul Bayles
Following Fire: A Resilient Forest / An Uncertain Future
Jan 4 - 27, 2024
Shortly after the 2020 Holiday Farm Fire burned 173,000 acres along the McKenzie River in the Oregon Cascades, photographer David Paul Bayles and scientist Fred Swanson started this project to observe and photograph the forest’s response to fire.
Over many site visits, four distinct photographic approaches have been used to share the story: documentary, chronosequence, typology and fine art. Following Fire is a project aligned with the long-term research at the nearby HJ Andrews Experimental Forest, where some inquiries are planned to last 200 years. When necessary, David and Fred will pass the project and its archive to a younger generation to continue documenting the long story of forest after fire.
With increasing urgency, we face the need to reimagine our relationship with forests and fire in deeper, more useful and strategic ways. Forests have a lot to teach us about how to live together in complex and diverse communities.
Many thanks to our generous sponsors:
Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word
Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation
HJ Andrews Experimental Forest
McKenzie River Trust
David Paul Bayles (American, b. 1952, he/him/his) focuses on landscapes where the needs of forests and human pursuits often collide, sometimes coexist and on occasion find harmony. Some of his projects utilize a documentary approach while others use a more contemporary art practice.
Bayles’ deep connection with trees was forged in the mid seventies when he left the suburbs of Los Angeles to work four years as a logger in the Sierra Nevada mountains. A month before leaving the woods for photography school David was chased down a steep hill by a large log. His instinctive, snap judgment, saved him from being crushed by the rolling log, punctuating the four year physical experience with a profoundly spiritual one. While attending photo school in Santa Barbara, Bayles became committed to environmentalism. His dual perspectives of logger and environmentalist add an authentic and unique approach to his photographic projects.
He currently lives and photographs in the Coast range of western Oregon, where highly efficient industrialized working forests supplanted the massive old growth forests many decades ago.
His photographs have been published in numerous magazines including Orion, Nature, Audubon, Terrain, Commonweal, Outside, The L.A. Times Sunday Magazine and others. Public collections include The Portland Art Museum, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Santa Barbara Art Museum, The Harry Ransom Center, Wildling Museum and others. His book Urban Forest, Images of Trees in the Human Landscape was chosen by The Christian Science Monitor as one of their seven favorite books of 2003. The David Paul Bayles Photographic Archive was created in 2016 at The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley to archive his entire life’s work.