September 16, 2025
4 min read
Contributors to Scientific American’s October 2025 Issue
Writers, artists, photographers and researchers share the stories behind the stories
By Jen Schwartz
Chris Gunn
The Lives of Dead Trees
For almost 25 years Chris Gunn (above) worked as a contract photographer for NASA, where he shot precious objects such as moon rocks brought back from the first Apollo landing and, as lead photographer for the project, captured three years of the James Webb Space Telescope’s construction. That often meant working in clean rooms, with their rigid protocols and highly controlled conditions. So when Gunn entered the dense forests of Oregon to take pictures for journalist Stephen Ornes’s story about a long-term study of decaying logs, it was an entirely different experience. “Having shot in locations with such stark geometric patterns for so long, going into the forest, initially I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, some of the trees are not straight,’” he says, laughing. “They are messing up my photograph!”
Gunn, who has lived in the Washington, D.C., area most of his life, had been seeking assignments that would both bring him closer to nature and communicate environmental change. “In so much of my previous work, I’ve been an outsider looking in on something, and this time I was really inside it,” he says. Gunn likes his images to be super sharp, so he observed how light was falling through the canopy; controlling the exposure gave depth to his photographs. Although the subject was dead trees, “there was still so much life,” he says. “It was magical from an imagery perspective.”
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