In honor of this evening’s lighting of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, we’ve pulled together a few favorite photographs of the various incarnations of coniferous trees, the emblem of the holiday season.

In the mix: out in the desert, Mike Sinclair and Stephen Antonopoulos capture the glory of the beginning and the bitter end of the tree’s journey from farm lot to disposal. In Tim Barber’s photograph a truck and tree make a great getaway, gliding off stealthily in the fog. A tiny tree is lost in a bright, white sterile room, as photographed by Joseph O. Holmes. And Daniel Cheek, Emily Shur, Trent Parke, and Brent Clark make light of suburban holiday situations.

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Celebrated for his gigantic, stainless steel Cloud Gate sculpture in Chicago’s Millennium Park, Anish Kapoor is changing the cultural environment with his public works.

The Indian-born, London-based artist represented Britain at the 1990 Venice Biennale and took home the 1991 Turner Prize with his monochromatic, pigment-covered, abstract forms. Since then, he’s carved mysterious cavities in stone, made massive wax installations, and fabricated shiny concave disks — like the enormous Sky Mirror in New York’s Rockefeller Center — that dynamically reflect their surroundings.

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