When film was still around, just before digital relegated film to the status of heirloom technology, I'd take my Tri-X to The Photo Lab in west Berkeley for processing. Often a new exhibit would be up featuring a customer's work and I'd experience that moment of hope: maybe something really magic this time. And I'd slow down as I moved from photo to photo. It's not so easy to capture magic and, as I went from photo to photo, usually it was not quite, no, no, not quite.

But one day I found myself going from photo to photo and thinking, hmmm. I didn't know how I felt. Weeds. That was the subject of this new exhibit. Then the next day, when picking up my contact sheets, I stopped and looked again. Hmmm, nice enough. Hmmm. Over the next three weeks while dropping off or picking up film, I must have passed these new photos five or six times. And each time, I'd slow down and stop. Each photo was done in the manner of a botanist's field records: spine flower, chorizanthe, sp. a native plant sometimes cut along road sides as a weed.

These were the overlooked plants, the ones that spring up along railroad tracks, in vacant lots and in the cracks of broken sidewalks: common mullein, wild radish, filaree, cocklebur, wild oats, dove weed, puncture vine, teasel, burclover, cardoon, mugwort, poison hemlock, miner's lettuce. Hmmm. On a table sat a stack of neatly stapled pages for anyone who wanted to learn more about the photos. I picked one up and put it in my briefcase. Each plant was documented:  Fennel, Foeniculum. "Fennel is a strongly aromatic weed common in California, probably carried here by Italians who raise two cultivated forms..."

Something quiet was gaining ground on me.

One day, while driving along, I found myself thinking about Doug Burgess's exhibit and without warning, I knew his work had to appear in the next issue. It took that long for the hidden quality to penetrate. And when it did, I realized how rare this little exhibit was. The care he'd taken. But really, it wasn't so hidden. It was simply foreign to the world of competing images.

As he wrote, "The relationship between weeds and people may be one of our most enduring relationships with the natural world. The weeds do not have our sense of self-consciousness, they do not use tools, they do not have free will, they can't even move after their roots are in place. And yet, their numbers and colonization parallels our own."

I called Burgess up. We have to talk, I said.  The interview appears in issue #8.

In the interveiw, Burgess says, "In a very flip way, but with a kind of serious undertone, one of the wonderful things about photographing weeds is that they are everywhere, and they're cheap. Nobody wants them. Nobody can ever take them away because they will always be around. So in a very strange way, photographing weeds is something that cannot enter the marketplace very well. There are immense chemical industries trying to kill the weeds, but somehow they are surviving." Burgess looks off into the distance. "Is there no plant that isn't beautiful? Then what does that mean? It may reflect something that is inside of us."

Posted by Richard Whittaker | comments (0) | permalink | more 'Conversations' |