MANUAL (Suzanne Bloom and Ed Hill), “Beech // Book”

By Donna Tennant

March 23, 2024

Moody Gallery, Houston, Texas

MANUAL (Suzanne Bloom and Ed Hill), “Anatomy of the Beech,” 2023, archival pigment print, 17 5/8 x 13 1/2”

“Beech // Book: an emblematic pairing” brings together photographs of books and trees, both of which have been core subjects for MANUAL throughout its practice. The exhibition marks the 50th anniversary of Ed Hill and Suzanne Bloom’s continuing collaboration under the pseudonym MANUAL. It is a multifaceted project supported by a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship and currently on view during FotoFest, a citywide biennial that includes exhibitions, lectures, and more.

Hill and Bloom spend part of each year on their forested property in rural Vermont, where beech trees grow among maple, birch, ash, and white pine. Six series of images comprise “Beech // Book,” each series functioning like a chapter in a book. As the artists point out, the word “book” (Buch in German) stems from the word “beech” (Buche), which likely is due to the early Germanic use of beechwood as a medium for carving runic characters. As an homage to the beech tree, all 55 archival pigment prints are framed in beechwood.

MANUAL (Suzanne Bloom and Ed Hill), “Outside / Inside (Tree Anatomy by Alex L. Shigo) I,” 2023, archival pigment print, 15 3/4 x 38 5/8”

One series, “Anatomy of the Beech,” is a suite of 24 closeups of the trees’ platinum-gray bark. Arranged in a grid, the surfaces of some resemble an elephant’s hide, while others capture the abstract patterns created by shadows, white spots resulting from fungal disease, and various textures caused by scars and knotholes. Another series, “Reading the Family of Man,” continues one of MANUAL’s constructs that dates to the early years of their collaboration — posing a figure behind a tree with their arms reaching around it to hold a book or artwork. In this instance, MANUAL selected the celebrated “Family of Man” catalogue documenting the 1955 exhibition of more than 500 international photographs curated by Edward Steichen. In that year, under the cloud of a possible nuclear war, “The Family of Man … became legendary for its humanist message …” In MANUAL’s photographs, 12 spreads of the book held by Bloom appear to be presented by the beech tree.

In the next series, “Outside / Inside,” MANUAL juxtaposes compelling views of the forest with pages of Alex Shigo’s book, “Tree Anatomy.” This gift from their arborist expanded the artists’ knowledge of the inner workings of trees, including how they absorb sun, rain, and carbon dioxide, as well as how they communicate with other trees through a network of latticed fungi in the soil.

MANUAL (Suzanne Bloom and Ed Hill), “View from the Library (Sunset),” 2023, archival pigment print, 43 7/8 x 33 3/8”

For “View From the Library (Sunset),” Hill and Bloom positioned their tripod inside at the edge of their library and a window revealing a beech tree in the distance. The image combines a still life with a landscape, but is so much more. At one point, they realized that “a tree is to a forest as a book is to a library,” an analogy that “thundered” in their heads. It became clear to them that trees communicating with one another runs parallel to the intellectual connections among disciplines in a library.

For “The Underground,” they photographed various fungi collected from the forest and presented them alongside the book “Entangled in Life; How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures” by Merlin Sheldrake.

MANUAL (Suzanne Bloom and Ed Hill), “Fruit Bodies in Common #5,” 2023, archival pigment print, 22 x 28”

The “Keys to Understanding” series includes an oversized portrayal of “Power of Movement in Plants,” a book written by Charles & Francis Darwin and published in 1880. Presented on a block of beechwood, the book’s spine faces the camera, and the book itself is opened slightly to display its marbled covers. The Darwins pose the question, “Do plants have something like a ‘root-brain’ that enables them to decide where and when and how their roots will grow?” and answer that “… the top of the radicle thus endowed … acts like the brain of one of the lower animals.” The size and intensity of the photograph reflects the monumentality of their conclusion.

The artists’ choice of the word MANUAL for their collaboration relates to both “handbook” and “touch.” According to Bloom, many of their projects are “in the category of a manual toward reinvestigating or reconsidering art history, or various aspects of cultural history,” while the others are more about experience or touching (from an interview with Ann Tucker in 1980). For years, the artists have focused on representing nature in “strong but non-clichéd ways.” For “Beech // Book,” they delved into the biology of trees, following where their research led them. The relationship between trees and books was a result of this.

MANUAL (Suzanne Bloom and Ed Hill), “The Triumph of the Tree (by John Stewart Collins), Day,”

2023, archival pigment print, 20 3/8 x 15 5/8”

Over the course of a half-century, MANUAL has worked consistently in series, which has allowed them to become more deeply involved in their subject matter. They collect information in order to create context and understand the broader narrative visually. In this way, their approach to the work consistently blends their expansive interests with an elegant aesthetic.

Donna Tennant is a Houston-based art writer who writes reviews for various publications. Over the past 40 years, she has written about art for local and national publications, including Visual Art Source, Houston Chronicle, ARTnews, Southwest Art, Artlies, and the Houston Press. She has a bachelor of arts in art history from the University of Rochester and a master of arts in art history from the University of New Mexico.