Casebound and interleaved with japanese tissue, Four Trees bears a hefty, elegant casing that shelters spare, ethereal prints within. Four high-resolution, monochrome photos of tangled trees are followed by excerpts from W.B. Yeat’s “Among School Children.”
“These four photographs in reproduction are taken from a handful of originals by Joan Roth made in the late nineteen nineties and early two thousands, most usually of the trees in the gardens of her house in Hymenstown, New Inn, in County Tipperary, Ireland. Here the two centerfold images are of eucalyptus trees in Elk, California, not native to her more temperate Ireland, but to her other home on the west coast of America.
“Before the digital copies of the images presented here, they were printed as silver nitrate gelatin prints on mould-made paper. Exposed lightly in the darkroom from the negative, more detail and darkness was then added by graphite pencil.” — Afterword
