Burdock

by Janet Malcolm

Over the course of three summers in New England, the writer Janet Malcolm gathered and photographed leaves of the burdock plant, a large weed that grows along roadsides and in waste places. Influenced by Richard Avedon’s unsparing portraits of famous people, Malcolm was drawn to “uncelebrated leaves” on which “life has left its mark,” through the ravages of time, weather, insects, or blight. In her introduction, Malcolm reminds us that writers like Chekhov and Hawthorne have used burdock “to denote ruin and desolation.” And yet, for Malcolm, Burdock is an homage to the botanical illustrators who recognized “the gorgeousness of the particulars of the things that are alive in the world.”

“Seldom has an American artist—in any genre—offered such clear-eyed images of the natural world. Skirting all the usual landscape conventions—sublime, elegiac, sentimental—Janet Malcolm has turned her wintry gaze on these most ordinary leaves, and the result is wondrous to behold. At once clinical and poignant, these photographs changed the way I look at the green world around me.” –Michael Pollan

Malcolm’s photographs of burdock leaves can be seen at the Lori Bookstein Fine Art Gallery in New York City.

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