Second Upside-Down Tree

The animating spirit behind photography is time, and the medium’s vital role in preserving the ephemeral expanded in the 1960s to include the recording of a wide array of Conceptual gestures and strategies, such as the new sculptural practice known as "earthworks". A number of artists including Richard Long, Michael Heizer, and Robert Smithson created often large-scale, site-specific alterations or additions to the environment; in doing so, they deliberately moved away from the Modernist tradition of contemplative, self-referential sculpture (epitomized by Brancusi) that sat comfortably in galleries and living rooms, to works that were carved out of and commented on the post-industrial landscape. Perhaps the best-known of these works was the massive stone Spiral Jetty (1970) created by Robert Smithson (1938-73) in the Great Salt Lake in Utah.
This photograph is of another, more ephemeral, work by Smithson, in which he upended a dead palm tree—now blooming its expired roots—on the shore at Sanibel Island, Florida.