Speaking of pieced together monumental gelatin silver prints of ancient Japanese treasures, Tacita Dean has made towering photographs of centuries-old cherry trees and colored them by hand. A couple were included in Blind Folly, her 2024 show at the Menil. The one above, Sakura (Usuzumi II), 2024, is from her London dealers, Frith Street Gallery.
Dean has been making portraits of ancient trees for a while, a practice which harkens back to the beginnings of photography. And the handcoloring of the sakura pictures makes them feel like 19th century photos. Except inverted, because she tints the trees’ surroundings, not their blossoms, which forefronts the human-made structures and braces holding up the trees’ branches. While venerating these trees for surviving 1,500 or even 2,000 years or more, it becomes clear that without these interventions, nature would have taken them out long ago. These aren’t only trees, or trees alone, buy monuments to centuries of symbiotic care and aesthetic value.
Embarrassingly, ages ago, I happened to live in Ogaki, the city in Gifu Prefecture that is the closest transit point to this Usuzumi tree, one of the Three Great Cherry Trees of Japan. I literally had no idea, and only realized the connection now, after I started digging on Dean’s photo of Jindai-zakura, the oldest cherry tree in Japan, which belongs to François Pinault. [The photo, not the tree. Yet.]