It's interesting to me that the author spent years looking at these photos and wrote a very long article about them and still doesn't seem to understand the photographs. I think I spent less than a minute before I at least I think I got something more out of it than what the author saw. I could be totally misunderstanding the author though.

All the reasons Nigel gives for what makes those photos interesting miss the point I think.

> "although any of us could have taken those pictures, only one person actually did"

> "Just knowing that these scenes aren’t the most beautiful places along the trail system provokes a rush of tenderness for that forest. It’s the same thing I feel looking at pictures of my wife caught unaware she’s being photographed, when she looks ordinary instead of radiant."

> "reducing each of Struth’s photographs to a list of the plant species it contained and some observations on the successional state of the forest. "

I notice this miss the point on artsy/literary stuff happens a lot when talking to other engineers. It's like there's a blindness that some can't seem to overcome. To see the pictures in another way, the keyword here used in the article was "complexity". Look at one, and image this wasn't a photograph at all. Imagine it if were an abstract painting, like a pollock painting. Forget about the forest, and that there are plants in it, just focus a little bit less and look at the lines. The author is looking at all the wrong details. Struth here seems to care about the tangle of lines, the massive dark structures contrasting with the little bits of tiny complex jumbles. I'd guess the best I could do is to say to an engineer, try to write a program that generates patterns like this. What would that look like? These aren't photos of randomness, there is complex, sophisticated architecture in these plants trying to fight for scraps of light. It's humbling and in a way reminds me of other types of structures in nature like the superstructures in the cosmos, like the CfA2 Great Wall[1]. Try and focus out a little, like I said, try and see it as a painting. Turn off the forest, and then if you get it, turn it back on, because context is important.

A good analogy here might be the 3D Stereograms that were popular in the 90's. Some people looked at those things and couldn't see the 3D (I often couldn't) but would say they see something.

[1] http://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full/2004/31/aa0696/img12.g...