WEEDS & ALIENS: AN UNNATURAL HISTORY OF PLANTS by B.A. Huseby

Torpedo Press, 2014, First edition, 100 pp., 8 1/2" X 11", Hardcover

Fine

Huseby’s first monograph is all at once a field guide, a photography book and an eco-polemic. The photographs are of plants he has found between his home and studio in Berlin over the last five years.

Weeds & Aliens is an occasionally arbitrary collection of photographs of some rather wonderful, useful plants, normally considered weeds. The book is thought of as an introduction to the fragments of nature around us, even in the most urban of habitats. What is a wild plant, a native plant, an invasive or alien plant, a weed?The story of weeds is the story of man and civilization, of agriculture and migration. There are no weeds in the wilderness, but, then again, can we truly speak of wild nature?’
(From the introduction)

Weeds & Aliens attempts to expand upon ecological discourse by shifting how we define nature and our relationship to it, occasionally suggesting strategies in opposition to mainstream biologists, as well as discussing our changing cities, our evolutionary possibilities, modes of migration and the inherent colonial racism embedded within the languages and sciences used to articulate vegetal life.