Sidewalk Reclaimed, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt
Weeds are feral plants, the bane of gardeners and pavers. They thrive in the most inhospitable settings, taking root in the sooty dust that collects in cracks, taking over abandoned urban spaces with remarkable speed, breaking concrete and reclaiming mankind’s barrens for the kingdom of plants.
Straight and Scribbly Lines, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt
Weeds on Stairs, 2003, photo by Fred Hatt
Urban Copse, 2006, by Fred Hatt
Weeds may be glorious wildflowers or medicinal herbs, thistles, grasses or ivies. The kind that thrive in cities often seem to have forms that are ragged, jagged, scribbly, electric. They’re tough and prickly, like many urban dwellers.
Street Grass, 2008, photo by Fred Hatt
Grassburst, 2007, photo by Fred Hatt
Demolition Site, 2009, photo by Fred Hatt
In our uncertain time, everything seems to be breaking down. Industrial civilization defines prosperity only as growth, but the limits to growth are looming everywhere. Population and consumption of resources have exploded. The atmosphere is running a fever. Our food and all our technology are built on reservoirs of oil that may be running dry. Our financial system is metastatic, a cancer growing on the real economy. Our political system is sclerotic, too beholden to moneyed interests to act for the common good. Bold change will not come from our leaders, but only from our forced adaptation to catastrophes.
Greenpoint Dandelions, 2003, photo by Fred Hatt
Such times will be hard for vast monocultures, and for hothouse flowers (and I do intend those as human metaphors). Such times call for weedy spirits, for those that can find their earthly grounding even in the decaying manufactured world, and who burst with green power, determined to reassert the forces of life.
Storm Drain Greenery, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt
Cobblestone Grass, 2002, photo by Fred Hatt
Blue/Yellow/Green, 2002, photo by Fred Hatt
Backlit Weeds, 2002, photo by Fred Hatt
Vacant Lot, 2002, photo by Fred Hatt
I took all the photos in this post in New York City, over the last seven years.
9 Comments
Burdock grows wildly in Maine. I remember getting its prickly spurs stuck in my socks when I walked through a field as a kid. In Japan however, it is an agricultural product, not a weed. The roots are high in fiber.
So I guess the definition of a weed is in the eye of the beholder, or uh… something like that.
Hi Fred, I’ve always been curious how you pick your post topics because they feature photos from so many years, but they all work together so well to create a theme. Point in case: how do you have so many photos of weeds that you’ve taken over the years?
I’m also thinking back to the advertisement post a few months back where you captured images from the 80’s, 90’s, and current ones too. You must have an ever-present camera!
So true, Andrew, all that defines a weed is that it is a plant someone finds undesirable. The Wikipedia article on weeds, linked at the beginning of the post, contains a list of plants commonly considered weeds, including such plants as sorrel, St. John’s wort, and cannabis, all of which are considered highly desirable by some!
Lori, one of the reasons I started blogging is that I had a 20 year backlog of material! For me, making images is a constant practice, and many of them have never been shown publicly. I was looking for something to do with all this stuff.
Since about 1990 I’ve often carried a camera with me. I’ve rarely gone out specifically for the purposes of photography, rather I just took a camera to record things that caught my eye when I was on my way from place to place, as a kind of sketchbook to help me remember fleeting impressions. I would tend to be attracted to things for aesthetic reasons such as the quality of light or a pattern of colors or textures.
In 2001 I got my first digital camera and suddenly could take an unlimited amount of shots with no clear purpose. Once a week or so I’d copy my favorites into a select folder.
After a few years there were thousands of shots in the selects file. When I look through them certain subjects and themes will strike me and I can always find other treatments of that subject from over the years.
I noticed that I was visually attracted to weeds, for instance, and thought about what it is about weeds that appeals to me. I realized I identify with them, and that led to the thought that many of the famous artists of the past are like hothouse flowers, highly cultivated, eccentric and fragile, existing only in a rarefied environment. I wanted to speak for a tougher and humbler way of being.
I went through my thumbnails from the last seven years and found about 75 pictures of weeds. I chose some samples and wrote down some of my ideas and there’s a post.
It’s often the same with the drawing posts. I attend at least two life drawing classes weekly, so I have great piles of figure drawings. If I notice something interesting about one drawing I can surely find many variations on the theme.
That was a good question!
These photos are so interesting! I love ‘Grassburst’ and ‘blue/yellow/green’ and ‘Vacant Lot’ is just waiting for someone from ‘The Wire’ to run down it (even if that was filmed in Baltimore!). Fascinating how a skilled cameraman can make a mundane topic visually interesting (and the words too!).
Fred, your online galleries are so well thought out, they are like exhibitions themselves.
And this post in particular has made me stop to look at weeds with a healthier interest (rather than gotcha! yank). Thanks for your larger explanation — I think everyone who drives by your site might be interested in knowing your M.O. too.
“…and that led to the thought that many of the famous artists of the past are like hothouse flowers, highly cultivated, eccentric and fragile, existing only in a rarefied environment.”
Fred, I really think you are on to something with this comparison. It’s like maintaining green grass yards in the arid southwestern United States. Imitating the natural beauty of Ireland is unsustainable (fragile) in a desert without lots of effort and expense. So why suppress native beauty, such as manzanita and cactus?
It boils down to imitation vs. authenticity. This reminds me of something I heard in an art class recently: “Art historians know what they are supposed to like.” It’s a slightly different topic, but the same basic idea.
Lori, probably I “identify with weeds” because my work has been consistently rejected by the art establishment, but I just keep doing it anyway. The internet is a good place to grow weeds!
Andrew, last week I saw the new restored version of Michael Powell’s classic film “The Red Shoes”. That was a perfect depiction of the concept of the artist (in this case, performing artists) as hothouse flowers, for whom normal life equals death. This attitude is a manifestation of the disconnect between the large numbers of creatively motivated individuals and the tiny number of artists the society is willing to recognize, as I discussed in the post “Why Art Doesn’t Pay.”
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[...] tribute to my dear friend Fred Hatt, who recently published an exquisite, life-affirming blog post about weeds. If you haven’t seen it, you must! Here’s my photographic tribute to weeds. I think [...]
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