Sap In Their Veins by David Paul Bayles

Sap In Their Veins Portraits of Loggers and the Trees They Fell Photographs by David Paul Bayles Published in 2023 by Alder Ego Press Harcover 79 Duotone Photographs 8.75 x 11 inches - 152 pages ISBN 978-0-87071-241-8 In 1972 David Paul Bayles left the suburbs of Los Angeles for a summer job as a logger. Then, instead of heading off to photography school in the fall as planned, he stayed. Four years later, celebrating the end of his last day of logging with his crewmates over a few beers, the woods boss toasted him: “We wish you well in photo school and please don’t forget us dirty old loggers.” Bayles didn’t. A decade later he returned to the forests of the northern Sierras, Mount Shasta, and Redwood coast regions to create a photo exhibition that traveled through California and Oregon. In 2004 he expanded the project, focusing on how northern California’s logging industry had changed and altered the lives and culture of the men with whom he’d spent long days working in forests, men who worked with their hands and intuition. He discovered that with the increased industrialization of the forest and the arrival of machine-oriented tree felling, work that had relied on experience in meeting challenges, on camaraderie and trust, was in danger of becoming more like a robotically-operated assembly line. As one logger told Bayles, “They’re taking the Paul Bunyan out of logging.”