Anodyne
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
 

What's up with all the magnolias?

An ancient genus of flowering trees. Magnolias predate bees! I like their strange bullet-shaped flowers, the best of which remind me of 1930s lamps. A tree that lays Art Deco bulbs!

Early flowering plants call attention to themselves in spring; all that pink and white froth is like turning a spotlight on a thing which, for the remaining 11 1/2 months of the year, disappears from view. Think of Carrie White arriving at her high school prom, or the scent of Proust's madeline. Latency.

I wanted to make a picture of a young tree that was still getting used to flowering. I found it on 8th Avenue in New Westminster, on a walk with my friend and bookseller colleague John Preston, and made its portrait over three consecutive days (A Young Magnolia in Spring, March 14). I like that its flowers are present, but unopened. When they are it will be a very different-looking tree. But I prefer to remember it this way, slowly changing from one thing into another.

The plan is to make four to six images of magnolias over the next week to ten days, and to collect them as a portfolio, a sequence of trees. Though as I hope is evident from today's pictures, the photographs are only nominally about the trees they depict, and more about flowering in place, under pressure.
- posted by cjb @ 11:13 PM


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