Mankind’s attempted dominion over nature is always a struggle—a theme explored in much of my work—and in the case of Kudzu, nature might have taken the upper hand.
I first encountered Kudzu when I was 13 years old and had moved to the mountains of western North Carolina. I delighted in spying the fantastic forms created as it covered everything in its path. Just like puffy clouds, the leafy Kudzu-draped landscape invites daydreamers to see people, faces, animals, and phantom-like creatures slumbering by the roadside.
Decades later, returning with my camera to photograph Kudzu, I discovered an undercurrent of melancholy in the landscape. By framing not just the uncanny formations, but also the man-made structures being overrun and threatened, the photographs suggest both the passage of time, through the vine’s insatiable progress, and a sleepy carelessness that allows for cars, trees, pastures, and buildings to become choked and covered. Depicted in black and white instead of the homogeneous green, I was able to emphasize the splendid way the strong light gives shape and weight to the Kudzu and animates the reaching hairy tendrils. I find humor in these photographs as well, like in any grotesque scene, and imagine them as settings in a Southern Gothic novel. There is a stillness here. No people are depicted, and their absence reinforces the dominance of nature I want to show, along with a hint of the post-apocalyptic.
When I began the project, I was using a large-format 8x10 view camera planted squarely on a tripod. I found that the anarchy of the Kudzu demanded a wilder approach. I switched to a medium-format 6x7 camera which allowed me to ditch the tripod and wade waist deep into the Kudzu on the mountainside, perch precariously on dead tree trunks, and dodge out into the middle of the road as needed. I haven’t used my 8x10 camera since.
Kudzu always evokes the South when I see it in my own work, or in the photographs of William Christenberry and Mark Steinmetz. An unmistakable Southern atmosphere of runaway fertility and loss.
