In the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens of Sarasota, Florida, Greg Urbano discovered a subject that speaks to photography’s essential pursuit: finding extraordinary vision in the ordinary world. His 2012 image of a banyan tree’s root system transforms what many visitors might walk past into a study of natural architecture, texture, and the quiet monumentality of growth.
Shot on a Nikon D5100 at 18mm, the photograph embraces the wide-angle perspective to emphasize the sculptural sprawl of roots as they emerge from and return to the earth. The technical choices here are deliberate—an aperture of ƒ/4.5 provides sufficient depth of field to keep the intricate root structures sharp from foreground to middle ground, while the 1/80s shutter speed at ISO 100 captures clean detail in what appears to be soft, overcast light. The conversion to black and white strips away the distraction of color, allowing the image to become purely about form, line, and the interplay of light across weathered surfaces.
What makes this photograph compelling is its invitation to reconsider scale and presence. Banyan trees are known for their dramatic aerial root systems, which drop from branches to establish new anchor points in the soil. These roots, over time, become massive supporting structures that can make a single tree look like an entire forest. Urbano positions his lens low and close, giving these roots the monumentality they deserve. They undulate across the frame like organic highways, their surfaces marked by the patient work of decades—moss-covered in places, smooth and silvered in others, each groove and crack a record of growth and adaptation.
The composition draws the eye through natural pathways. The roots create flowing curves that lead deeper into the frame, while pockets of accumulated leaves and debris provide textural contrast and visual rest stops. There’s an almost sculptural quality to the way light models the cylindrical forms, revealing their three-dimensionality through subtle gradations of gray. The photograph operates on multiple levels: as documentation of a specific botanical specimen, as an abstract study of natural form, and as a meditation on time, persistence, and the hidden infrastructure that supports visible life.
Within the context of the Top 100 Journey project, this image represents the photographer’s developing eye for architectural elements in nature. The banyan’s root system is, after all, a kind of natural architecture—functional, structural, and beautiful in its purposeful design. The black and white treatment connects this work to photography’s documentary traditions while simultaneously elevating the subject into the realm of fine art.
There’s something humbling about standing before such a root system, and Urbano’s photograph captures that sense of being in the presence of something both ancient and ongoing. These roots speak to persistence, to the slow but inexorable way living things claim their space in the world. The photographer’s choice to work at ground level, to get close and look carefully, reveals a fundamental photographic truth: the world rewards sustained attention. What appears as mere roots at first glance becomes, through the lens, a landscape unto itself—complex, textured, and worthy of extended contemplation.
Greg Urbano 