The online Digitalt Museum collects together images from a number of different Swedish museums. It currently has over half a million artworks in the Public Domain and hundreds of thousands more that are free to use with the appropriate Creative Commons licence. A search on ‘träd’ (tree in Swedish), ‘photograph’ and ‘Public Domain’, returns a wonderful collection of black and white vintage photographs all taken in the early part of the 20th Century. As an essential part of the scenery, each tree creates atmosphere and silence forcing the viewer into introspection and emotional isolation. What then arises will depend on your outlook: an echo of divinity? An emptiness of soul? Something altogether different? Trees are knowing conduits of all sorts of human emotion, while simultaneously serving us relentlessly in biological terms.
