Schoolyard tree, Vancouver

"I decided not to limit myself to the cumbersome walk-in camera obscura structure and made some inverted images of trees just by using a field camera. . . . I was thinking of the category of portraiture, and of all that 19th century photography of trees—very straightforward documents. . . I was particularly interested in it as an iconic image, something you would see in a text book illustrating the idea of the inversion of an image in general, showing the mechanism of the optics of the eye."

Rodney Graham quoted in Grant Arnold, "'It Always Makes Me Nervous When Nature Has No Purpose' An Annotated Chronology of the Life and Work of Rodney Graham," in Meschede, Friedrich, ed. Rodney Graham. Through the Forest, exh. cat. (Barcelona: Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona; Basilea: Kunstmuseum Basel, Museum fu?r Gegenwartskunst; Hamburgo: Hamburger Kunsthalle, 2010, p. 106/107