Portraits of Stumps

Taking nightly walks in suburban Northern California, I repeatedly encountered abandoned tree stumps protruding from neighborhood front yards and beside sidewalks. The labor and expense required to extract a tree stump is often excessive, so they remain in place, left to linger, as unintentional memorials to past aspirations. Taking the time to photograph these stumps, to make visible their unique shapes, their presence in space, became an exercise in empathy, an expression of affinity with objects now disregarded.