Trees are the source of all life. Water, too. But trees have an intrinsic beauty and charm. They remind us of ourselves: trees have qualities that we should strive to achieve; they ask for nothing and give everything: their splendour, their place in the landscape, their umbrella of shade on a sunny day.
Trees are modest, dependable, trustworthy. The rain forests are the earth's lungs. Trees oxygenate our world. Without trees we would be breathless. Every time a tree is cut down without another being planted to replace it the world is diminished. Each and every one of us has lost something.
When Didier Carré first starting taking photographs of trees he did so because trees are such marvellous things. Was he aware of the sexual metaphor in the shapes of trees, in the underlying message entwined in the roots?
Sometimes the poet must be told when his poems mean; of the symbolism captured in his own words. Sometimes the photographer, too, with his portraits.
As friends began to see the allusion, the sensual bows and arcs of branches and boughs in willows and ferns, in the oak and the ash and the bonny elm tree, so Didier began to understand that his shots were optical poems to procreation, to the glory of nature: to the very differences between man and woman. The male is often unyielding. The female yields, bending to accommodate each new situation The oak stands rigid holding the snow in its branches until with the weight of winter they break and fall. The willow bends and bends and in the spring she springs back to life.
Didier saw in a falling leaf a falling tear and his mind went back to La Fontaine’s tale of the oak and the reed. He saw in the mighty trunk of the hardwood trees the manhood symbol, a soaring phallus like a carving on an Indian temple. The flowing fronds of the willow and magnolia encapsulate the shapes and shadows of the female so perfectly in a diptych the tree and the nude are a visual orgasm, a still moment stolen from time and preserved forever.
In art, vertical framing has a male signification; horizontal represents the female. Didier often takes his photographs vertically, but become equal and one with his subjects by placing them in a square frame: the perfect balance of yin and yang.
Clifford Thurlow
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