Art of Saving Trees

One day in 1976,Tom Zetterstrom  was driving country roads in his Saab, the model for which you mixed oil into the gas at every fill up. Steering with one hand, he aimed his Fujica GW690, a medium format film camera, and with a wide-angle lens he photographed a white birch, capturing, as he puts it, “the terror and speed and excitement” of the moment. And so began Zetterstrom’s  “moving point of view series,” images gleaned from speeding vehicles along this country’s  lengthening roads and tracks to capture the fleeting wild. And to protect it.

This image, with its swirling grasses and the tree’s bleached trunk and trembling limbs, is the center of an exhibit of Zetterstrom’s work in Lisa Vollmer’s new  studio and gallery in Great Barrington, MA. 

It is a small, refined show wonderfully set in Vollmer’s gallery with its deep-gray shiny walls, white-painted floors and ceilings, and track lighting (of course) with a great white-blossomed orchid at Vollmer’s desk.

At one end of the gallery is Zetterstrom’s famed series of a single American Elm shot in different seasons in an open field. “Elms are healthy until they are infected with Dutch elm disease (so named because it was Dutch scientists who identified the fungus that was killing these mighty trees). It was like AIDS used to be,” Zetterstrom says. “When they got it, they died.” 

These days, injecting the American elm with a fungicide protects them, and that is one of the initiatives of Elm Watch, an organization bent on preserving this much-admired shade tree.

The last image in the series of that elegant elm, Zetterstrom says, launched the effort to protect what he calls “public trees.”  And he augments his photography with fervent speeches on the majesty of arboreal life around us.

In another section of the gallery hang six images, among them a sweeping willow and, at the end, two “totally dead” Bristlecone trees, “the oldest living tree species,” Zetterstrom says of these two, now naked and luminous, one fallen into the body of the other.

Photographs by Tom Zetterstrom are at Vollmer Gallery through June 30.

A reception is slated for June 18, 5 to 7 p.m. The gallery is at 322 Stockbridge Road (Rt. 7) opposite the entrance to Barrington Plaza. Circle left for the gallery. Information: 413-429-6511 or go to www.lisavollmer.com.