David Paul Bayles – Sap in Their Veins

Review by Hans Hickerson ∙

Sap in Their Veins offers portraits of loggers as well as their personal narratives. Photographer David Paul Bayles was able to document loggers as an insider, as he himself spent four seasons working in the woods with logging crews. Looking at and reading the book we develop a better understanding of loggers and of how they view their job, its traditions and evolution, and as a result we do not see them as one-dimensional cartoon characters but as distinct and complex individuals.

The photographs were taken in the late 1980s during the spotted owl controversy and then again in the mid-2000s. Besides the author’s preface, a logging glossary, and acknowledgements, the book has two distinct parts. In the opening “Falling Trees” section the photographs to my mind function as art and in the second “Portraits and Stories” section they function as photojournalism. But they share the same focus and complement each other.

In the “Portraits and Stories” section the photographs work to tell a story about loggers, while in the “Falling Trees” section the photographs have no story-telling responsibilities but can resonate freely on a factual as well as a metaphorical level. It is just the trees falling – the thing itself – with no one telling the viewer what to think. Here there is no text but just a series of sixteen photographs, mostly one to a page.

The sixteen images stand as powerful testimony to the pathos, banality, and violence of cutting down trees. Although they (and the book) are agnostic as to whether cutting trees is harvesting or senseless killing, the photographs document the irreversible moment between the Before and After, between existence and nothingness. This is high drama, and great art. Death in the afternoon, but in the forests of California. Bruegel’s Fall of Icarus, where nobody pays attention to the unfolding tragedy, and where life goes on as before.

The tension between life and death is memorably rendered in the liquid blurs that registered movement on the film as it was exposed – the perfect visual metaphor for the final transition between dimensions, made even more vivid as in Bruegel by the contrast with the highly detailed, picture-perfect natural surroundings. Wow. These are deceptively simple photographs with timeless as well as contemporary resonance, and they offer a singular contribution to American landscape photography.

The second section, “Portraits and Stories,” is more extensive and documents the men and machines in words and pictures. We see and hear from fallers, choppers, chipper operators, catskinners, choker setters, knot bumpers, siderods, hook tenders, feller bunchers, loader operators, truck drivers, and tanbark peelers. We see them in action working in the woods, resting on lunch break, relaxing with their crewmates at the end of the day, and at home with their kids.

A behind-the-scenes view of a little-known profession, Sap in Their Veins offers a unique, well-documented look at loggers and logging.

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Hans Hickerson, Associate Editor of the PhotoBook Journal, is a photographer and photobook artist from Portland, Oregon.

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David Paul Bayles – Sap in Their Veins

Photographer: David Paul Bayles (born in 1952)

Language: English

Design: Tanner Irwin

Hardbound cloth cover with dust jacket; 79 B & W photographs; sewn binding; ISBN 9780870712418; 152 pages; 11 X 8.75 in.

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