八海山

2022年1月の早朝。休日だったこの日、上越線の列車を撮影しようと、関東ナンバーの車が何台も集まっていた。冬晴れの山々を背景に、鉄道ファンたちもきっと素晴らしい写真を収めていたことだろう。私は霧の中を車で走り、住宅地のすぐ近くにあるこの場所で初めて撮影に臨んだ。放射冷却の影響で魚野川から立ち上る霧が、すぐそばの鉄道架線をやわらかく覆い隠してくれている。晴れた日には、魚沼をはじめとする日本有数の豪雪地帯ならではの、まぶしいほど明るい雪景色が広がる。

左手には、まるでイラストの中の立木のような4本の杉の木が並んでいる。古典的な絵画でも、木は主題ではなくとも画面の片隅や全体を覆うように描かれることが多いが、あくまで風景の一部として扱われ、木そのものがテーマとされることは少ない。私は現実の樹木を撮影しているので、絵画のように自由に表現することはできないが、「バウムテスト」と呼ばれる心理分析手法があると聞く。紙と鉛筆で木を描かせ、その描き方から心の状態や対人関係の傾向を読み解くという。例えば、太くしっかりした幹は精神的安定や自己肯定感の高さを、細く折れそうな幹は不安定さやストレスの高さを示すなど、詳細なパーソナリティ診断に利用されている。

カメラマンなどそこにある木を取捨選択して写している場合でも、撮影者の心理が反映されているのかもしれない。構図的に安定感のある樹木を好んで選ぶ私は、どんな傾向なのだろうか。普段は画面の中で重たいマッスとなるため避けがちな杉の木も、この日は遠近感を生み出し、冬の冷え込む風景の中にどこか擬人的な温かみを添えてくれていた。

人間が生きる自然の中に樹木の存在が欠かせないように、特に風景画や風景写真の中の樹木は生命を感じさせ、無機質に見えるような自然の場合にでも人と風景を繋ぐためになくてはならない存在の一つだ。

Early morning in January 2022. On that day, which was a holiday, many cars with Kanto license plates gathered to photograph trains on the Joetsu Line. With the clear winter mountains in the background, railroad enthusiasts must have taken some great pictures. I drove through the fog and took my first photo at this location near a residential area. The fog rising from the Uono River due to radiative cooling softly obscured the overhead railroad tracks nearby. On a clear day, the snowy landscape is dazzlingly bright, as is typical of Uonuma and other areas with heavy snowfall in Japan.

To the left, four cedar trees stand in a row, as if they were standing trees in an illustration. Even in classical paintings, trees are often depicted as covering a corner or the entire picture plane, even if they are not the subject of the painting, but they are treated as part of the landscape, and the trees themselves are rarely the theme of the painting. Since I photograph real trees, I cannot express them as freely as I do in my paintings, but I have heard that there is a psychological analysis technique called the “Baum test. They ask people to draw a tree with paper and pencil, and from the way the tree is drawn, they can decipher its state of mind and interpersonal tendencies. For example, a thick, solid trunk indicates mental stability and high self-esteem, while a thin, broken trunk indicates instability and high stress levels, and is used for detailed personality diagnosis.

Even when a photographer or other person is taking a picture of a tree that is there in a selective manner, it may reflect the photographer’s psychology. What kind of tendency do I have to prefer trees that are stable in terms of composition? The cedar tree, which I usually tend to avoid because of its heavy mass in the picture, created a sense of perspective on this day and added some anthropomorphic warmth to the chilly winter landscape.

Just as trees are indispensable to the nature in which human beings live, trees, especially in landscape paintings and landscape photographs, are one of the indispensable elements that connect people and landscapes, even in the case of nature that seems to be inorganic.

EOS5DMarkⅣ 35mm 0.4秒　f:10

©️photo by Nakamura Osamu