Leaves and Light: Sunprints of American Native Plants

(Hardback)

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Since we imagine something intentional about a community both in its formation and its function as a new entity, there is something both baffling and attractive about the idea of a "plant community." Do plants know what they're doing Some claim our attention: good to eat, good to smell, get stuck to your clothes. For a majority, plants or plant communities arouse a restricted admiration: lawn. A lawn can be a plant community, an atrocious one to be sure. But I'm thinking of plant communities in the eyes of God, where the plants foregather in ancient times and set out toward infinity. These deserve the word community, and the individuals who make them up are original in the extreme, as they must be: they live in a tough town.

It is our luck that the eternal aspects of these daredevils have fallen to the eye of artist Lindy Smith who has used the sun in ways known best to her to reveal the souls of plants as lives, as archetypes, as semaphore. Their shapes seem to belong to dreams while for all their unexpectedness they are no more accidental than dreams. What we see emerges from the lives they've lived in deep time; their importance hangs over them as an aura.

We long to say their names: milkweed, mullein, bulrush, fescue, rush, yarrow. Or, on the other hand, sumpweed, pigweed, spurge. They belong to the things we see for the first time while recognizing we've known them always, hence the longing to absorb their eternal forms. Creation-we have it by our fingertips, just. Smith's images Smith has discovered the souls of so many plants I thought I knew and left their essential signatures on my mind that I will never see them in the same way again, or more to the point, forget them again. I wish I knew enough about the process to understand what help the sun has been in finding these plants out. But here they are, seen by an artist, and what help it is.-from the Preface by Tom McGuane

Author Bio

Lindy Smith was raised in Iowa and spent childhood summers camping with her family in the West. Her father, a high school chemistry and physics teacher, gave her a Brownie camera and taught her to develop film in the school darkroom. Her mother, an elementary school teacher, took her on many nature walks during those summer camping trips. She received a degree in French and photography from Bennington College and received a certificate of completion at LUniversite de Caen in Normandy. She founded Visual Concepts, a display and interior design firm In Massachusetts. She returned to photography in 1992 after observing a Buck Brannaman horsemanship clinic in Wyoming, which led to seven years of documenting ranch life from Montana to Arizona. In 2000 she began making images under sunlight. This work is in many public and private collections. THOMAS McGUANE lives on a ranch in McLeod, Montana. He is the author of ten novels, including the National Book Award-nominated Ninety-two in the Shade, three works of nonfiction, and four collections of stories. His work has won numerous awards, including the Rosenthal Award of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and has been anthologized in the Best American Stories, Best American Essays, and Best American Sporting Essays.