A handbook of weeds

 

All the way from Tasmania comes Felix Wilson's 'A Handbook of Weeds',  a crisply designed collection of pictures of weeds. Shot by night time, bombarded by flash light, these pictures are, in fact, the exact opposite of a handbook. Instead of pointing out the generic the pictures all show shapes that are wild, unruly, grotesque and antithetical to reductionism. No L-systems here: these are dramatic assemblages of plants and their backgrounds, weeds as textural noise, twigs and branches waving in the night, Blair Witch style: there is a lot of black in these pictures. Never did a blackberry plant look so theatrical. The use of artificial light sometimes creates depth in what is almost flat, like when a single plant seems to consist of various layers, and sometimes it creates a flatness in what in broad daylight would be a three-dimensional structure. I hope I make myself clear. To top it off it comes attached with a bag of seeds and the only text are four lines of TS Elliot. What more do you want?

 

Picturing the forest with Loic Thisse

I have long believed that a talent for photography is similar to the talent for having excessive toenail growth. Recent experience has made me revise this and I regret to say that yes! photography is indeed a skill that some people have developed to admirable heights. On this blog I attempt to keep a record of the cryptoforests that I find and I try to use the simple pocket camera that I borrow from my partner to capture the scenes that strike me most, but the images never come out right. 

Personal failure explains my new found appreciation of someone like French photographer Loic Thisse who does know how to photograph a forest. My response when I first saw them was: these could be my pictures if I knew how to do it like this. Thisse's pictures often show untended landscapes that are not wild but in waiting for the human hand to change them, they speak of silence and gloom, but with a contention that this are good landscapes. 

What's more: his twitter feed is a good source of forest photography all round: like this.

Sorrel and Yarrow

From Elliot Porter's photobook 'Nature's Chaos' (a real eye-opener when I found it in a bargain bin at least ten years ago) comes "Sorrel and yarrow" (1982). It is not the most spectacular image in the book but as I am looking more and more at wild herbal fields like this I am starting to see what Elliot is trying to capture in a picture like this, and also how well he does it. What I like about Porter is the way he steps aside from taking pictures of objects and tries to capture textures and processes instead, but I might undestand him wrongly:   

"It is the beauty of nature that I try to represent by photography. What this expression means to most people, I am quite sure, is such features as flowers of spring, autumn foliage, mountain landscapes, and many other similar aspects about aesthetic qualities of which no one would care to offer contradiction. That they are beautiful is indisputable, but they are not all that is beautiful about nature; in fact they are only the obvious and superficial aspects of nature - which anyone may observe with half and eye. They are the peaks and summits of nature's greatest displays. There is no doubt about their importance; they could not be dispensed with. Underlying and supporting these brillant displays are slow, quiet processes that pass almost unnoticed from season to season, unnoticed by those that think that beauty in natures is all its gaudy displays."

Sorrel and yarrow are incidentally both edible.