Primordial Chaos, Washington State

Yoshihiko Ueda was born in Japan in 1957 and worked for years in a clean, controlled photographic register. Then at some point he drove out to the Quinault rainforest in Washington state and something gave way.

He described what he found: undergrowth rustling, moss glowing green as if lit from inside, a collection of living colors saturated with rain and light. He called it a kingdom of primordial chaos. Said he witnessed something human eyes weren’t normally permitted to see. The man was shaken—maybe more moved than is strictly professional to admit in an artist statement, but the statement holds up because the work does.

The series he made from those visits is called Quinault, and it’s traveled to galleries worldwide. What strikes me about the images is that they don’t feel like landscape photography so much as portraiture—the trees are subjects, not settings. The light doesn’t illuminate them; it conspires with them. Ueda is framing living things that simply happen to be stationary.

I’m generally suspicious of nature photography that tips into rapture—the forest-spoke-to-me energy that belongs more to a vision quest than to a gallery wall. But Ueda earns it. The ecstasy is inside the image, not just in the caption. Whatever he found out there in those Washington woods, the photographs are the proof of it.