Lori Bookstein Fine Art is pleased to announce “Burdock,” an exhibition of recent photographs by Janet Malcolm, from September 9 to October 11, 2008. Departing from the collage work the artist exhibited in her two previous shows, Malcolm explores the myriad permutations of the burdock leaf in a photographic medium. This is Malcolm’s third show with Lori Bookstein Fine Art, and coincides with the publication of a collection of photographs by Yale University Press, released this month.

In an introductory essay, Malcolm describes how, during summers spent at a house in the Berkshires, she came to start gathering leaves of the burdock plant, a large “rank weed” with medicinal properties “that grows along roadsides and in waste places and around derelict buildings.” Propping them up individually in small glass bottles and shooting them head on, Malcolm strips them of their previous associations and turns them into veritable photographic subjects. Influenced by Richard Avedon’s unsparing portraits of famous people, Malcolm is particularly drawn to the “uncelebrated leaves” upon which the ravages of time, weather, insects or blight have defaced her subjects. Through careful selection, Malcolm’s burdock photographs become, in part, anthropomorphizing personal narratives, as well as homages to the tradition of botanical illustration of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries.

Kathryn Shattuck, profiling the book for The New York Times, writes that the collection of images “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.”

Although her images of burdock represent Janet Malcolm’s first foray behind the lens, she is an accomplished writer on the topic of photography. Her book, Diana and Nikon: Essays on Photography, is a critically-acclaimed collection of essays on the greatest photographers of the twentieth century