An immigrant from Bohemia, Drahomír Josef Ružicka lived and worked in New York and was a founding member of the Pictorial Photographers of America. He spent much of the 1910s photographing the green spaces of the city. Interested in the natural world, Ružicka found metaphoric potential in these dramatic twisting branches, and the resulting image demonstrates his technical finesse and attuned sense of light and shadow. In the 1920s, Ružicka returned to his native Czech lands bringing Pictorialist publications and ideas to the Czech photography scene. He was a key interlocutor in the international exchange of Pictorialist aesthetics and techniques.