Trees in Transition: The Photography of David Paul Bayles

As a fascinating counterpoint to our woodworkers exhibition, we present the photography of David Paul Bayles. 

“David Paul Bayles left Los Angeles in the mid seventies for the Sierra Nevada mountains to work one season as a logger. He fell in love with the physicality, the camaraderie and the dangerous work. One season became four as he worked setting chokers, bumping knots and skinning cat. To this day he struggles to answer how he could love trees and forests even as he loved the work that brought them down. In a larger sense it is not his question alone. We are a culture that consumes and often abuses and destroys Nature in so many ways, even as we profess our love for her.”

His images of working forests show the beauty, brutality and other-worldiness of farmed forests.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website