39 TREES (1997-2004)
Since 1997 Harvey Benge has been photographing trees in the cities he visits all over the world, such as New York, Paris, Milan, Budapest and Amsterdam. The condition is that the tree shows signs of human intervention. For instance, a tree he photographed in Berlin, in what was once the Communist side of the city, bears a carved heart with the date 1984. A tree in Hanoi bears a simple spray-painted question mark. These signs in 39 Trees (1997-2004), or as Benge calls them ‘traces and scars of the past’, call up questions – questions about who made them, when, and why. ‘I suspect that many of these signs have survived the people, events and relations from which they came,’ says Benge. ‘They let the past penetrate the present.
