Michael Tymbios is the unexpected benefactor of an archive of tree photographs, as well as the two film cameras with which they were documented. The collected images were taken as scientific records by the German founder of the Dendrological Society of South Africa, Dr Fried von Breitenbach, and passed along to Michael via his enigmatic godfather. Michael received the film cameras prior to inheriting the photographic archive and created a parallel archive of tree photographs as part of his wider artistic practice. In the Studio, he unpacks and interweaves the scientific images of trees with his own photographs.
During his three-week residency, Michael pursues a more sculptural form for these complementary images, that he might reframe discrete photographs as objects. In these efforts, Michael visits Jared Ginsburg's studio at Atlantic House to experiment with poured resin, works with strategies presented by found objects at A4 (among them a record display stand), and uses the in-house printer to test scale.
Extracts from a 2003 government report, Methods and Procedures for the Selection of Champion Trees in South Africa for Protection in Terms of the National Forest Act of 1998, prove formative as a working logic, offering curious – and often non-sequitur – captions that accompany Michael's image experiments.
"Several photographers I admire and have had conversations with have spoken about photographs specifically (but I think you can apply this to images in general) as having a charge that tracks events outside their own life or their own story. And that charge comes and goes as things happen in the world. I hold on to them, these dendrological photographs, because I feel they have a great kind of potential energy as images or pictures."
– Michael Tymbios in conversation with Lucienne Bestall
