NY Times July 20, 2008
ART
Leaves Speak; a Journalist Listens
By KATHRYN SHATTUCK
AS a journalist and critic Janet Malcolm wields prose with the precision of a scalpel, creating studies unflinching in their directness and layered with meaning and metaphor.
But lately Ms. Malcolm has banished traditional vocabulary to produce a different kind of portraiture. Mature, callow, tattered or freshly unfurled, her subjects stare forth from the page, exactly the same yet endlessly varied. Viewed on their own, they might be thought merely beautiful or occasionally odd. But as a group, they reveal a cross-section of diversity, their stories as complex as those of any human upon which Ms. Malcolm has cast her eye.
“Burdock,” a book with 28 photographs and a two-page essay by Ms. Malcolm, is to be released on Aug. 11 by Yale University Press. It can be read in a number of ways. As the next step in an unassuming photographic career. As an ode to the botanical illustrators in whose work Ms. Malcolm finds inspiration. As an essay on nature, and on the self. As a love story.
“After seeing the prints in Janet’s studio, I leapt at the chance to acquire ‘Burdock,’ ” Ileene Smith, editor at large at Yale University Press, wrote in an e-mail message.
“In a way, these leaves are Malcolm’s ultimate biographical subject,” said Ms. Smith, who most recently edited “Two Lives,” Ms. Malcolm’s 2007 examination of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. “They are also at some level deeply autobiographical.”
In “Burdock” Ms. Malcolm sets a straightforward tone for her foray into obsession and then allows the images to speak for themselves.
“For three successive summers, on the top-floor landing of a house in the Berkshires, I have been photographing burdock leaves,” she writes in the book’s essay. “I prop them in small glass bottles and photograph them head on, as if they were people facing me. No two leaves of any plant or tree are exactly alike, of course, but burdock leaves are of conspicuous and almost infinite variety. They are also outstandingly large — more than two feet long in some cases — which makes them extraordinarily good photographic subjects.”
On a late-June afternoon Ms. Malcolm, slender and relaxed in jeans and a white shirt, moved through her airy home near Sheffield, Mass., whose gray-shingled patina suggests more history than its 1980s vintage.
Over lunch on a screened porch she chatted easily as Prince, her sturdy 4-year-old cat, sought attention by jumping on the table. Outside, clumps of catnip, yarrow, sage and hollyhocks brightened the expansive lawn, arrived at by way of a wandering driveway cut through the woods. A breeze blew off the face of nearby Mount Everett.
It is difficult — impossible, really — to think of Ms. Malcolm, she of the formidable literary reputation, as just another interview subject. The tricks of the trade are laid bare, and a halting dance begins, with each aware of where the other is about to step.
Like master to apprentice, Ms. Malcolm could not help but ask questions of her own or gently suggest a second glance at information that might give texture to a story. (Several days later she called to offer more thorough responses after worrying that she had been reticent. “I actually came to all this thinking about the leaf quite late,” she said, “and only now after being provoked by the questions.”)
After the meal she headed up two flights of stairs to the small attic room that is her office, home to an aging computer whose cloudy screen causes her consternation. Behind her desk a wide-brimmed straw hat rested on a long table, covering her Leica camera and its close-up lens.
“I wear this in case I need to shade my eyes from the sun,” she said, pulling on the hat and walking into the hallway, where a large skylight cast rays onto the landing. She demonstrated her technique by steadying herself against the wall at the top of the stairs and pointing her camera in the direction of the small table against the opposite wall, on which she places her leaves.
“I’m afraid I’m self-taught and not very well taught,” she said. “I know that I know what to do. It isn’t that I’ve taken some step to become a photographer: I’ve become a photographer of burdock.”
The assessment is perhaps modest. Ms. Malcolm’s portraits of fellow authors grace book jackets. Her criticism of the medium, captured famously in “Diana and Nikon: Essays on Photography,” first published in 1980 and then expanded in 1997, is highly regarded. Somewhere, somehow, much of that knowledge must surely have worked its way in.
“I was always trying to take art photographs,” she said. “But the most interesting pictures were the snapshots. The artsy pictures were boring, always.”
She cited Richard Avedon’s portraits of celebrities, their scars and barnacles exposed, as an inspiration for her own portraits of common leaves. “Avedon radically extended photography’s capacity for cruelty,” she writes. “The ravages of time and circumstances on the faces he photographed were mercilessly, sometimes gruesomely, recorded. As Avedon sought out faces on which life had left its mark, so I prefer older, flawed leaves to young, unblemished specimens — leaves to which something has happened.”
Ms. Malcolm suggested an excursion to the town dump — one part utility, the other artistry. A week’s worth of garbage and a bucket of water in which to put cuttings loaded into the back of her yellow Toyota pickup, she maneuvered the manual-transmission truck with the expertise of a farmhand.
Garbage delivered, she headed down a dirt road with shaggy ditches, the kind of unkempt place burdock likes to grow. A pair of garden shears in hand, she sifted through vines and brambles, lingering over and then clipping those leaves that looked promising, usually the larger, drooping ones at the bottom of the plant.
Chekhov and Hawthorne used burdock to denote ruin and desolation in their writings. But burdock has medicinal and culinary purposes as well. In the wild the root is eaten by the larva of the ghost moth; in Asia it is julienned and braised with carrots and soy sauce. Herbalists use dried burdock as a diuretic and a blood-purifying agent. Oil derived from the root is thought to promote hair growth.
Still, when asked to define what makes a burdock leaf worthy of being photographed, Ms. Malcolm faltered.
“Some of the best-looking leaves turn out to be poor photographic subjects,” she said later. “When you take their picture, they come out looking kind of mousy and diminished.
“Then there are leaves that come out looking like some amazing new thing. It’s impossible to predict which leaf will, so to speak, pass its screen test and show itself to have the qualities of a star. But over time I have come to have a sense of which leaves have some possibility of stardom and which leaves are not even worth giving a screen test to.”
“I want an image that has some strangeness, even grotesqueness,” she said. “I can often tell after putting a leaf into the jar that it is going to fail the screen test — that the photograph will be uninteresting — and discontinue its sitting.”
Ms. Malcolm dedicated her book “To the memory of Gardner,” and it is on her long drives with Gardner Botsford, her husband and her editor at The New Yorker, that her affection for the ordinary weed began. It was the summer of 2004, his last.
In the garden, as on the page, Mr. Botsford pruned.
As a writer, “I always felt extremely fortunate to have the benefit of his ear and taste,” Ms. Malcolm said, acknowledging that some of her colleagues didn’t share her view and contended that he ruined the rhythm of their sentences. One called Mr. Botsford “the Ripper.”
“I knew I wouldn’t disgrace myself after he had edited a manuscript,” she said.
But at their Massachusetts home Ms. Malcolm pleaded with Mr. Botsford to lay down his loppers.
“Here in the country Gardner would, in his phrase, ‘edit the woods’ that surround the fields,” Ms. Malcolm said. “He made trails for walks. He made clearings for ferns to grow in. He liberated trees from the bittersweet vines that are threatening the New England landscape. My objection to his editing of the wisteria vine that shaded the porch may have been like the objections of the writers whose rhythm had been ruined.”
Finally Mr. Botsford declared a cease-fire, the evidence of which is tacked to the inside of a kitchen-closet door. The note reads:
“I G.B. will not prune wisteria or other vines on front porch for one year as of now 5/27/95. G. Botsford.”
Ms. Malcolm too eventually acquiesced. “I have come to understand that the wisteria has to be pruned if there is to be a ray of light on the porch,” she said. “I do it at least twice every summer.”
Rifling through an unbound copy of “Burdock,” she assessed the physical aspects of the leaves she has immortalized — the frayed edges and dusty veins of a leaf long on the stalk; the insect holes rendering another as fragile as lace; the healthy young one, gorgeously flushed and only faintly marred, like a rosy-cheeked child with scraped knees.
“If these leaves saw these pictures, I don’t know what they would think,” Ms. Malcolm said. “There is beauty in flaws.”
