From @BillShapiro former LIFE editor
It’s Friday so let’s Meet This Photographer: David Paul Bayles (@davidpaulbayles) lives in the Oregon woods and between two worlds: Corvallis, a college town, and Philomath, a smaller, working-class logging town. And that, to my eye, explains at least part of the tightrope magic of David’s new book of old pictures, “Sap in Their Veins,” which focuses on loggers and the forests in which they toil.
This is a subject David knows well. In 1972, before heading to photo school, he took a summer job as a logger. But David was attracted by “The physicality of the work, the camaraderie, and culture of doing something dangerous.” School would have to wait, as David spent the next four years among the big trees and the men working to bring them down.
Judging from his pictures, David loved the trees and the loggers in equal measure. And so when he returned to the woods in ’87 and ’88 (shooting for nearly 5 months) and then again in ’04, he was tuned-in to the changes that machine technology had brought to the logging life. The big trees were threatened, but so was the logger lifestyle. And this, I think, speaks to the romantic yet melancholy notes in this beautiful black-and-white body of work and the poignancy of some of the book’s oral histories.
Usually, logging is presented as a question of man vs nature. David’s take is more nuanced: “I’m not opposed to logging,” he told me, “but I am opposed to clear cutting. I’m not opposed to careful and conscious use of wood products but I am opposed to waste and inadequate recycling.” I asked David what he hopes we feel when we finish “Sap”: “The book begins with the falling tree series for a few reasons. One is to share the power of that moment when the fibers of the tree rip apart as a reminder of the consumer’s role we all share in this process.”
Available from Oregon State University Press.