Contesting plant-blindness with photography: Michael “Nick” Nichols’s portrait of a giant sequoia

Abstract

Michael “Nick” Nichols’s 2012 portrait of the 3200-year old, 247-foot tall giant sequoia named the President, the second largest tree known, for National Geographic, comprised of 126 separate photographs which have been digitally combined to make one image, challenges cultural plant-blindness and confronts the ethics of representation of plants, in particular trees, when the images are printed on plant-based paper. Neither art nor scientific illustration, the photojournalistic image draws connections between trees and photography, and both individualizes the tree and metaphorically references the biocommunity in which it participates. Nichols’s approach to the portrait, which recognized the intimacy between himself, his team, and the tree, draws attention to plant sentience. The materiality of the image, published as a fold-out poster printed on paper that includes tree content, has the capacity to alert the viewer to the ethics of plant representation.