The Man Who Retied the Trees Back to Life

The Man That Cut the Binding Strings

One cut tO destrOy while One sOwed tO restOre

This book was created with the intent to spark imagination and allow the viewer to decipher what the meaning of the story was to them. This assignment was a project where the challenge was to capture images that worked in a way that words do in telling a story. Pictures allow much to be communicated. Sometimes, in more ways than words can. Looking at a photograph that someone else had taken inspired the story that I person-ally took from the photograph. In that photograph, there was a man in a hat holding a piece of string in the woods. This made a whirlwind of ideas run through my mind. I took multiple pictures and tried various methods to communicate the story that I created. After taking many images, I ar-ranged them in a sequential manner that most effectively told the story. I edited different versions and finally came to these final versions. The other challenge was to create three ways of telling the stories by telling it in five images, seven images, and nine images. I chose for the five-story version to only tell one part of the story. The seven-part told the story with a different focus. The nine-story was the story with the most information.

My version of the story was a about a land where trees were man made as well as man destroyed. The summary of my story goes like this. The trees had a reached a time in life where they couldn’t grow on their own. They needed a creator to piece by piece sow the trees together. A guardian of the greens would day by day go out to the woods and with the help of his rope and needle, sow the trees up. The land was full of trees again until one day a mischievous man took his scissors and went through the woods cutting the rope that had the trees together. The land was full of tiny pieces of trees. The guardian of the greens was devastated that his hard work of restoring the land with trees was for nothing. However, one day he realized something. He still had plenty of rope left. He took his rope and went out to where the mischievous man was snipping away tree after tree. The guardian of the greens stole the pair of scissors and with his rope, bound the scissors together in a way that could never be opened or used again. He knew his place from this day forward would be to continue sow-ing up trees.

-Larissa Gallaher