Had this painting in mind while making the last two images in the current book edit.

My image with the view down the forest road, with inversed colors, was made with Rousseau in mind, but it wasn’t until after I made that photo that I saw this painting at Berkeley Art Museum.

Certain of my monochromatic(ish) tree images I think evoke drawings like this, by Rousseau and others.

My image of the broken aspen tree was made with this painting in mind.

One thing I think about in relation to landscape images from this time period is the focus on the sublime power of nature, and how that compares to today when nature seems so vulnerable to human power.

Bierstadt is of course a significant visual touchpoint for this project, perhaps more so his small studies/sketches - like this and the following few images. I find the difference between these and the grander large-scale works instructive — these seem very rooted in real physical and perceptual experience while the bigger paintings present more of an idea of a place than its reality.

I’m overall less interested in Church and Hill (in the next couple of images) than the others here, but I put these in because there is a certain pastel color palette in these that infuses a lot of earlier American landscape paintings, and which I try to touch on in some of my images.

Overall, the landscape painting tradition was more on my mind than the photo tradition. Not completely though, of course. I’m really drawn to photos that are at once more rooted in the real than paintings — as photos inherently are, usually — but are also much weirder in their own way.