Malcolm, New Yorker
writer, critic and the author of insightful biographies The Silent Women
and Two Lives
, launches into a different discipline with this collection of botanical photographs. Instead of multidimensional human characters, her subjects are page after page of burdock leaves, the “rank weed... [that] writers have used to denote ruin and desolation.” Malcolm writes that she has tried to photograph the leaves “as if they were people,” taking inspiration from Richard Avedon’s unflinching celebrity portraits and the work of botanical illustrators. Accordingly, many of her chosen leaves are imperfect, marred by blight, insects and the ravages of the environment. These are Malcolm’s favorite specimens, as she hopes that the camera’s “transformative capacities” confer “aesthetic value on the apparently plain and worthless.” That transformation doesn’t happen all on its own, though; it requires a measure of technical skill and visual flair, and the evidence in this book is that Malcolm doesn’t have the chops for the job. While there is an austere splendor in these simple, plainly lit, head-on shots, too often the images seem flatter than they should. Interesting variations in color, shape and texture are lost to an apparently overly shallow depth of field. (Sept.)
