Trees at night,
awakened by light

Most photography of nature works with the light that is already there — the slant of morning, the gold of evening. Yoll Lee works differently. He finds a tree by day, studies it, and returns at night to give it his own light. In the dark, the tree is lifted out of its surroundings and made to stand alone, lit as if on a stage.

This is more than a technique. The photograph still begins in record: a specific tree, in a specific place, with its own history. But over that documentary foundation he lays the flow of his own feeling — the emotion and inspiration the tree and its place have stirred in him. The light is the carrier of that feeling. It is precisely this added subjective layer that he names as the line between his work and documentary photography: the record is kept, but it is no longer neutral.

From the “Blue Tree” series of 2013, his subject widened into the trees of the world. The Himalayan rhododendron of Nepal (2017); the olive trees of Italy (2018); the baobabs of Madagascar (2020), which he titled The Tree the Gods Loved; the mangroves of Fiji (2023). Each is a tree carrying the weather, the soil, and the long time of its own region.

In Korea his attention settled on the sacred trees of the islands — the sinmok, the village guardian trees in which a community has, over generations, gathered its memory and its faith: “Jeju Sinmok” (2021), “Sinan Sinmok” (2022), “Tongyeong Sinmok” (2023), “Namhae Sinmok” (2024). Photographed at night under his light, an ordinary old tree becomes again what the village always held it to be — a presence, not only a plant. The history of a place is read through the tree that has stood at its center.

For Yoll Lee, photographing trees and protecting them belong to the same work. In 2013 he led the “Yangjaecheon Embankment Tree-Saving Movement” and carried it to success — keeping standing the very kind of tree he photographs. From this practice grew a larger dream: a Forest of Art, a place where nature and art live together, which he now pursues as chairperson of the Forest of Art Social Cooperative.

That same patience appears in his books. In 2025 he published the photo essay The Slow Human (Geulhangari), of which he is both writer and photographer; the work was selected for the 14th Green Literature Award. The title names a stance as much as a subject — a way of moving at the speed of trees and weather rather than of cities. Across two decades of teaching, of gallery direction, of photographing the heroes of MERS and the poets of the secular city, the trees have remained his steady center: a record kept, and a light added.