`Leaves to Which Something Has Happened'

“I do not doubt but the majesty and beauty of the world are latent in any iota of the world…

“I do not doubt there is far more in trivialities, insects, vulgar persons, slaves, dwarfs, weeds, rejected refuse, than I have supposed…”

These lines from Whitman’s “Assurances” came to mind even before I opened Janet Malcolm’s new book Burdock. The eponymous weed, a thistle, is conventionally scorned as botanical vermin. As kids we called it “elephant ears” for its oversized leaves. Its burrs snagged our sweaters in the fall. There’s the scientific name, Arctium lappa; the common name, burdock; and the folk name, elephant ears -- all poetry.

Over three summers at her home in the Berkshires, Malcolm collected burdock leaves and photographed them against a white background, propping them in small glass bottles visible in two of the book’s 28 photographs. In her introduction Malcolm says she shot the leaves “head on, as if they were people facing me.” Richard Avedon’s high-contrast, black-and-white photos of celebrities served as her models:

“Avedon radically extended photography’s capacity for cruelty. The ravages of time and circumstances on the faces he photographed were mercilessly, sometimes gruesomely, recorded.”

In the Avedon spirit, Malcolm says she prefers “older, flawed leaves to young, unblemished specimens – leaves to which something has happened.” Nearly every leaf she includes is diseased, tattered, discolored or insect-gnawed. One is so thoroughly perforated it resembles coarse green lace.

A noteworthy difference between Avedon’s people and Malcolm’s burdocks: One cannot be cruel to weeds. Avedon was a voyeur with a sadistic streak whose subjects, many of them masochists and narcissists, sought him out. His photos of ravaged living people resemble post-mortems. Malcolm’s pictures reveal unsuspected elegance and beauty, as a close look at any natural phenomenon will.

Malcolm cites old herbals and botanical models, “whose subjects have been similarly plucked from nature and rendered in splendid unnatural isolation,” as sources of inspiration, and then writes her truest sentence, “Looking at natural forms close up is an exercise in awe.” Any effort to look and see is laudable, which reminds me of Guy Davenport’s wonderful essay “Finding,” in which he refers to “a Thoreauvian feeling of looking at things.” He writes in a spirit similar to Malcolm’s:

“Our understanding was that the search was the thing, the pleasure of looking.”

For all the pleasure I derive from Malcolm’s photos, I note a whiff of preciousness about her project. Would Yale University Press have published a book of weed pictures by an unknown photographer with gifts equal or superior to Malcolm’s? For the cover price of $60 you get a two-page introduction (in which she uses, unforgivably, “transformative” and “decontextualization”) and 28 photographs. Whitman could never have afforded the book, and I relied on the library.