Wildflowers, Against the Evening

India · nature

A spray of fine-leaved wildflowers silhouetted against a soft pink dusk sky, each tiny seedhead held out like a small dark constellation.

Roadside wildflowers in India do most of their best work at the wrong time of year — late winter, early summer, when the rest of the landscape is dry and there is nothing competing for the photographer's attention. They are not show flowers. They put up a small cluster of pale blooms, lose them within a week, and spend the rest of the season being stems and seedheads. The structure is the point.

I shot this one against a sky that had just begun to go pink and pale grey at dusk, with the camera held low enough that the plant ran from the bottom right corner all the way up into the centre of the frame. Every detail — the thin lance-shaped leaves, the small dried seedheads, the way the stems forked at irregular intervals — became silhouette work, drawn cleanly against the soft sky. There is a particular pleasure in photographing things that are almost finished. They are honest about themselves in a way that flowers in their first opening rarely are.

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