A few months later I was in the office of a forest ecologist, Alemayehu Wassie Eshete, who started his interview by telling me, “A church, to be a church, must be enveloped by a forest.”

These trees—for all their wonderful deformities—are endangered by the speed and vision of urban development and technological progress. Their data lives under the mercy and politics of each software update, and in a society that strives for pixel-perfect digital commodities, these photogrammetrees will soon be phased out for ones indistinguishable from reality.

Jacqueline Wu