DescriptionPhotograph 1930-40. Initially, using a No.1A pocket Kodak series 2 camera, Nash captured images so that he could refer to them in the creation of his paintings. Increasingly, however, he saw his photographs, not as aids or sketches, but as artworks in their own right.Here Nash depicts a dead tree on Romney Marsh, and his choice of subject matter is characteristic. Nash was always interested in landscapes and aspects of the natural world, not for their historical or aesthetic interest per se, but more because he thought that certain ‘places’ as he called them (see Biography) had about them a mystical importance, a ‘genius loci’, which lent the place, the stone, the tree, an importance which transcended its apparent properties. As he wrote: ’there are places…whose relationship of parts creates a mystery, an enchantment’. It is this mystery, this enchantment, which Nash tries to capture in his photographs.
