The forest photograph is the most misread convention in metal, and the misreading always runs the same way: everybody reaches for mysticism first. It is mysticism fourth at best. In order of importance it is a legal right, a budget, a national painting habit, and only then a belief about the woods, and the first three explain far more about why every one of these pictures looks the same than the fourth ever will.
That order matters because it turns a cliché back into a decision. Nobody in 1993 sat down and chose between a wood and a professional photographer's studio. There was one option, it was outside, it was free, and it happened to carry a hundred and fifty years of national meaning that the people using it had absorbed at school. Everything else in the look of black metal was assembled with more deliberation than this. The trees were simply there.
In Norway the forest is free by statute
Start with the least romantic fact available. Norwegian law recognises allemannsretten, the everyman's right, an old customary right of access and passage across uncultivated land, codified in 1957 by the Outdoor Recreation Act. Anybody may walk into any wood in the country, stand in it, and be photographed in it, without a permit, a fee, a landowner's permission or a reason.
Put that next to the finances of a band recording its first album for a label with no budget. Studio hire costs money. A hall costs money. A photographer with lights costs money and, worse, brings an adult into the room who will have opinions. A spruce stand at four in the afternoon in January costs a bus fare. It also supplies, at no charge, a low flat light that lasts most of the working day, an even dark ground that makes white paint on a face read at high contrast, and a background with no brand, no date and no city in it. Every technical property those photographs are admired for is a property of free Norwegian daylight in winter.
The country had been painting these trees for a century
The second layer is inherited and it was in place long before anybody plugged in. Norwegian national romanticism spent the nineteenth century establishing that the country's identity lived in its uncultivated ground rather than in its towns, and it did that through the folk tale collections of Asbjørnsen and Moe and through painters, Theodor Kittelsen chief among them, whose drawings turned the treeline into somewhere populated by things that are not people. The folk vocabulary even has a word for the transaction. To be bergtatt is to be taken into the mountain, to go in and not come out, and Ulver put that word on a record in February 1995 because it was the obvious title, not because it was obscure.
Alongside the painting sits a national idea with its own name. The word friluftsliv, open air life, is first traceable to Henrik Ibsen's poem Paa Vidderne of 1859, and Fridtjof Nansen gave it its modern sense in 1921 at a gathering of the Norwegian tourist association, reducing it to a simple life out of doors. A teenager in 1992 walking into a wood with a camera was therefore operating inside a framework that had a name, a literature, a legal basis and an approving national consensus behind it. It is the least transgressive thing anybody in that scene ever did.
What the photograph actually claims
This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks, bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight, stand like Druids of eld.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline
Now the part that is genuinely deliberate. A photograph asserts that the thing in it happened, which a painting cannot do, and a band standing in a wood in full paint is therefore producing an alibi. Not in a rehearsal room. Not in an office. Not in a city, not near a label, not within reach of anybody who might sell this. The picture is an argument about distance from the industry, and it is made in the one form that cannot be accused of being an illustration.
The composition carries a second claim that is easier to miss. In ordinary promotional photography the subject fills the frame, because the point is to sell a face. In these pictures the figures are small, often standing well back, sometimes absent altogether while the trees carry the whole image. That reverses the usual relation completely. A promo shot in which the band is the least important object in the frame is not incompetence, and thirty years of imitators cropping in tighter have proved the original photographers right by making the reversal disappear.
Then it turned into a joke, and survived that too
By the end of the nineties the convention had circulated far enough to become shorthand, and the images that travelled furthest were the ones that could be laughed at. Men in white paint among conifers, filmed on a mountainside, became one of the internet's durable pieces of visual comedy, and Immortal in particular have spent three decades being both the source of the template and its most reproduced parody. The band have taken it in good part, which is more than most of their contemporaries managed.
What is interesting is that the mockery changed nothing. The convention did not retreat after it became a joke; it professionalised. Label promotional shoots after 2000 use the same setting with better cameras, and the more a band wants to signal that it belongs to this tradition rather than to the wider metal industry, the more likely it is to be photographed among trees. A signal that survives being laughed at for twenty five years is a strong signal, whatever else it is.
Same trees, opposite argument
The convention then crossed an ocean and reversed its meaning, which is the clearest evidence that the trees never carried a fixed content. Wolves in the Throne Room, formed in Olympia in 2002 by the brothers Aaron and Nathan Weaver, rehearsed in a derelict cabin on an overgrown farm and built a body of work around what Aaron Weaver has called uncovering the energetic reality of a place. They use no corpse paint, no pseudonyms and none of the Satanic apparatus, and the woods in their photographs are the woods they actually live in.
The Norwegian forest says stay out. The Cascadian forest says come and live here. It is the same photograph and the opposite sentence.
So the honest account of the convention is that it is a free set with a national inheritance behind it, put to two incompatible uses by people who both believed they were being literal. That is a better story than mysticism and it survives contact with the evidence, which mysticism generally does not. The rest of the visual apparatus was assembled with far more calculation, and the clothes are where the calculation is most visible, in black Metal Fashion. For everything the imagery was built to serve, go to the index of the series.
