Georgia artist documents the coast’s disappearing treescape
Just before dawn on Ebenezer Creek, 20 miles north of Savannah, the water pools glasslike and tannin-dark, reflecting massive, flared trunks of cypress — some more than 1,000 years old — alongside columns of tupelo. Standing waist-deep with his camera, Teake Zuidema waits for light to slip over the world and then shoots a slowly moving arc of overlapping frames he will later digitally stitch together into a panoramic work at his home studio in Savannah.
The 72-year-old Dutch journalist and photographer, who writes about science and the environment and has been published by outlets ranging from The Guardian to National Geographic Traveler, moved from Pittsburgh to Savannah during the pandemic with his wife, the poet and fiber artist Sheryl St. Germain. Almost immediately he began photographing the coastal forests capturing trees that live and die by water.
“I was just smitten,” he said. “The coastal trees stand like they’re on stage for me. Many of them are dead skeletons, but they have so much character and emotion they seem alive.”
“Living on the Edge” is an exhibition of his work on view through Oct. 18 at ARTS Southeast in Savannah. It is funded in part by a $5,000 UGA Marine Extension and Georgia Sea Grant, given to artists, writers and scholars to deepen awareness of the state’s marine environments.
“The work is undeniably gorgeous,” said Jon Witzky, who co-owns the gallery with his wife Emily. “We hope the exhibit will spark an important conversation about climate change we all need to have. Georgia prides itself on its long coastline, and it is very well preserved compared to some other states. But even so, the saltwater is creeping up,”
Georgia’s coastal landscape consists largely of cabbage palms, live oaks, cypress, red cedar and tupelo, and the tree canopies host Spanish moss and resurrection fern, The ground can shift from sandy loam to dark soil to oyster shell middens left by Native peoples along the shore.
The titles of Zuidema’s images read like poem titles: “Stretch or Fall,” “March of the Decapitated,” “The Angry Oak.” Each photo carries a caption that explains why he captured the shot and a short description of the ecology that has shaped the landscape in that photo written by Elizabeth King, associate professor of restoration ecology at the University of Georgia.
Zuidema’s photographs echo both mythology and mortality. In one, the bare trunks of a flooded grove stand like an abandoned chorus line. In another, a twisted oak writhes, branches flung wide. “It looks like it’s having a seizure,” Zuidema said. “It’s full of energy even though it’s dead.”
Other trees showcase strength in deformity. “When a tree bends under pressure, the wood makes knots,” he said. “The knots interlock, and that makes the tree stronger.” At times, he says, he feels like he’s wandering inside a Salvador Dalí painting. “The blackwater creek is full of hallucinating reflections.”
Though many of the photos are black-and-white elegies, a few burst into vivid greens. In a postcard advertising the show, a 2023 photo titled “Easy Green” showcases a transformed Ossabaw Island wetland, dense with resurrection ferns and Spanish moss, the entire floor mirrored in floodwaters. This sudden fertility is typical of low lying areas ecologists call ephemeral pools. Within days the water will drain back into underground aquifers, the ferns fold back into dormancy, and the forest floor return to sand and leaf litter.
But that is happening too quickly now, as the caption on the photo notes: “So much water has been pumped out of the … aquifer under coastal Georgia, that surface water on the islands drains much faster into the ground, leaving the surface of the islands drier.”
“The fate of these coastal forests matters every bit as much as the fate of Georgia’s famous sea turtles,” said King. “Coastal trees can cope with a very wide range of environmental conditions, and they can tolerate being inundated, but not forever.”
Born into water
Zuidema grew up in Friesland, a coastal province in the Netherlands, a country engineered to hold back the ocean, since a third of it lies below sea level. Born into a family of writers — his mother was a well-known Frisian poet — he got a degree in anthropology, and at 22 taught himself photography. It did not come easy: “I really had to force myself to learn it, but I wanted to do something to set myself apart,” he said.
As a boy, Zuidema was intent on escape. “The countryside where I grew up is man-made and straight. Our streets, our canals are flat, and there is no mystery in it,” he said. “When I was a boy, my dream was to be a bus driver, because you could take a big bus far away to Liverpool. Then I wanted to be a sailor. And then I became an anthropologist.”
He lived in a Maya village in Mexico for seven months doing field work, and fell in love with “wild, chaotic Mexico, my favorite country in the world. It’s just the complete opposite of where I am from.” He married a woman he met in Nicaragua on assignment, and she brought him to her hometown of Pittsburgh. They had two children, and years after the marriage ended, he met St. Germain on a dating site.
“We were texting back and forth, and she told me she was from New Orleans,” he recalls. “I said, ‘Well, that’s funny — I grew up in the Netherlands, also at or below sea level.’
Their relationship began in 2005, just months before Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, flooding her mother’s home. “The Dutch came in to help rebuild the levees,” St. Germain noted. “They know water.”
Early in the pandemic, Zuidema woke one morning and told St. Germain that a stranger had come to him in a dream: You must move to Savannah, she said. He had only been to the city once, two decades earlier.
“I went down to make our coffee like I always do,” he said. “When I came back up, she was already on Zillow looking at houses.” That winter, after purchasing a house, they rented the largest truck they could and Zuidema drove it through a blizzard on long lonely stretches of highway dotted with deserted gas stations and empty hotels. St. Germain followed behind with 60 plants crammed into her car.
“We told ourselves, if we don’t do this now, we won’t have the energy later,” she said.
Both of them had returned to the waterscapes of their childhoods.
From journalism to art
Savannah freed Zuidema. For decades, he had made his living as a photojournalist and writer, and he still does. But he was always frustrated. “You send your slides off to the magazine and editors change them. I never considered my photography art — it was always documentary.”
That changed when he moved to the Georgia coast and taught himself color printing. The pandemic gave him solitude, and the trees gave him subject matter. “I wanted control again, like when I worked in a black-and-white darkroom in my 20s.”
Now, he wakes before dawn or waits until late afternoon light, drives out to barrier islands or blackwater creeks, and wades into the shallows.
King explained that barrier islands once grew and shrank naturally, one side eroding while another accreted. “Now, development and climate change pin them in place,” she said. “So instead of adapting, sections start to disappear.”
Her words echo in Zuidema’s photographs, where trees seem to mark the coastline like sentries at a doomed border.
“There was a famous dead tree on Jekyll Island,” he mused, “and it was memorialized in probably 10,000 photos. People got married there, or scattered the ashes of the dead there, and then in August 2024, tropical storm Debby blew it out to sea. That tree is no more.”
ART EVENT
“Living on the Edge.” Photographs by Teake Zuidema. Through Oct. 18. Artists Talk Sept. 17. ARTS Southeast, 2301 Bull St., Savannah. 912-231-7105, artssoutheast.org
