Arboreal-Entropy-Fine-Art-Photography | Clayton J. Mitchell Photography

As there are no more scheduled showings of my photography series “Arboreal Entropy” I wanted to share the pictures for everyone who was not able to make it out over the summer or earlier this month to see them in person.

Is the term “Arboreal Entropy” simply a fancy way of saying “rotting wood”? Well, yes.

But it strives to mean more, as do these photographs. To be honest, most of these pieces of wood have just been laying around in my yard for years. For some reason, I did not want to throw them away. Partially because their vaguely anthropomorphic forms look kind of cool, but I think they also say something about our own mortality. Perhaps, within the twisted roots, the dried out crevices, and the encroaching mold, lies a representation of the unknown…

the infinite.

By taking them out of the garden and into the studio, I wanted to see if I could capture what I felt. I shot them the same way I do a portrait – working to find the best angle, using careful and detailed lighting, trying to get my subject to relax in front of the camera… (I’m not kidding – they were tough to balance!)

The resulting images remind me of drawings I saw in a book called “The Elegant Universe” by the physicist Brian Greene. He was trying to visualize Planck Space, the ultramicroscopic world of subatomic particles. In this tiny world, dimensions fold in upon each other, matter takes very strange forms (if any at all), and time and space are at once so small and so large that they become meaningless in their incomprehensibility.

In the end, I’m not sure if these pictures solve any universal riddles, but I do think they’re pretty to look at.