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Extension and Repetition: A Senior Black + White High Dynamic Range Diptych by Cooper Treuhaft (2016)

Both of my images involve trees. The picture on the left is a shot of a larger tree trunk, while the picture on the right is of a wooden post with some electrical components bolted onto it. What I was trying to get at was the interaction between organic materials and inorganic materials, and the hierarchy of realities. I chose to put the more organic image on the left and the less organic image on the right to show a linear relationship between the two, trying to show that the difference between the two might be caused by a change in time. I think it's interesting how nature has produced and modified a the human species to the point at which we have reached today; where we have started to produce and modify nature itself. As if evolution is being compounded and weaving in and out of itself. The materials in both pictures are generally the same, with the exception of the metal in the picture on the right. Drawing attention to the metal was intentional, to try and get the viewer to figure out what the relationship between the two is.

I knew that I wanted to deal with the relationship between organic and inorganic things, so many of my challenges involved trying to shoot HDR images of organic objects. I needed to find an organic object that didn’t move because HDR photography requires your subject to be static. I tried to take photos of a person standing as still as possible, but do to the micromovements of my subject, it ended up not working out. I settled on shooting trees because they were a clearly organic subject. My final problem was to find an image that showed inorganic objects interacting with trees. I found a post made out of wood (a repurposed tree) that had electrical equipment bolted into it. I thought this was a very interesting interaction between humans and trees that was a good visual representation of the themes I was trying to get across with the image
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