> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://photopedagogy.ghost.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # From the Bookshelf - URL: https://photopedagogy.ghost.io/bookshelf-weeds/ - Published: 2026-06-14T10:43:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-18T10:44:05.000Z - Description: Kwan Queenie Li — Weeds: A Germinating Theory - Author: Jon Nicholls - Tags: Bookshelf I’ve been photographing [gutterobjects](https://www.jonnichollsphotography.co.uk/projects/gutterobjects?ref=photopedagogy.ghost.io) for years. Discarded, broken, surplus things at the edges of streets, shot close in with an iPhone, mostly from above. The project grew out of an encounter with the work of my friend [Peter Coles](https://petecoles.me/2012/01/09/canivaux-2/?ref=photopedagogy.ghost.io) and a slow accumulation of feeling that the city’s involuntary productions are at least as interesting as the things it plans. Probably more so. A gutterobject is dead matter, the city’s metabolic waste. What was once wanted is now surplus to requirements. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/09/0cc375b8-4a10-46fa-baba-83dd28e4be75_2074x1480.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/09/70b7414c-2ea7-4944-8a8a-cc4f61a49046_1976x1482.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/09/b42873d8-bbda-4ec1-bf54-291ea4566ff2_1980x1482.jpg) Jon Nicholls - from the series Gutterobjects Li’s weeds are different. They were never wanted in the first place. They grow precisely where they weren’t supposed to, reading the city’s neglect as opportunity. Both practices begin with the same question, though. What happens when you pay attention to what the city would prefer you to ignore? ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!077F!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb061f0f3-5482-48b5-b59a-391eedf21fe9_1280x1280.jpeg) I read [*Weeds*](https://mackbooks.co.uk/products/weeds-a-germinating-theory-kwan-queenie-li?srsltid=AfmBOoql-m6PzxJo7qfgX6ND5dEkLzye9rrAetGx5vWLt7sKdfXcRimA&ref=photopedagogy.ghost.io) on the train to the [Sony World Photography Awards](https://www.somersethouse.org.uk/whats-on/sony-world-photography-awards-exhibition-2026?gad%5Fsource=1&gad%5Fcampaignid=22418730666&gbraid=0AAAAADjmTU%5FaLTrewKbzHV0oaUFBb-iaQ&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI4Z7y5P35kwMVk5lQBh3RSRwqEAAYASAAEgJZavD%5FBwE&ref=photopedagogy.ghost.io) show at Somerset House. My friend Dafna Talmor was awarded a prize in the professional landscape category so I was keen to see her images (previously shown at [Sid Motion Gallery](https://sidmotiongallery.co.uk/exhibition/the-moving-eye-cannot-see/?ref=photopedagogy.ghost.io)) and the Joel Meyerowitz outstanding contribution feature exhibition. Li mentions an [Orbital video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJnve05CnNE&ref=photopedagogy.ghost.io) in the book. Tilda Swinton, walking in stop motion through the East End of London, pauses beside a weed growing from the base of a damp wall in a dark alley. She looks at it meditatively, then walks on. When I got home that evening I found a Signal message from my brother [Dave](https://substack.com/@paradoxa?ref=photopedagogy.ghost.io) (in New Zealand) with a link to the exact same video. > *Was reminded of this today ... one of my favourite music videos. Five minutes of stop motion Tilda Swinton in London to an Orbital backing track. Great stuff.* He hadn’t known it was in the book. He just thought I’d find it interesting. He was right, as he usually is when he points at things. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/09/65287348-8793-4352-90bf-ae8e389c98ae_1280x960.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/09/d687ce02-26dc-4b58-9f62-59d5e62e79ee_1280x955.jpg) Stills from the music video for Orbital's 'The Box' Kwan Queenie Li has been photographing weeds for over a decade, from Jerusalem to Shanghai, Varanasi to Cairo, Mexico City to Hong Kong, in cracks and drains, on abandoned buildings, at the bases of traffic cones, in the mortar of ancient walls. She calls what she is proposing “the weed’s point of view”, a way of reading cities through their involuntary vegetation, attending to what escapes control. The phrase echoes something in the photographic tradition. Eggleston’s famous fly’s eye view, the camera hovering in mid air looking at what humans take for granted, defamiliarises the ordinary by changing the angle of attention rather than the subject. Li’s angle is mostly the opposite. She looks down, close in. But the impulse is recognisable. Something small and disregarded repays attention if you’re willing to stop. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/09/bec4bf63-706b-446a-836d-0a00476b1b6b_2346x1550.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/09/2eb47553-f899-4d7c-aaed-df409bb6f8f1_2078x1370-1.jpg) William Eggleston - White Ceiling Fan, 1990 and Untitled, 1973 The book opens with Nietzsche on decay and decadence, Lu Xun on the death of wild grass, and then a single landscape-format photograph of a small weed at the edge of a metal drain cover. What follows is a sequence of over a hundred photographs interspersed with sections of text. The photographs are mostly shot from above, attentive to the abstract qualities of cracks, stains, plaster, brickwork and iron grates. It is a typological approach, systematic and accumulative, more archive than portrait. Occasionally the viewpoint drops. There is an image shot along the base of a massive curved stone wall, the camera at ground level, a weed caught between the masonry and a drainpipe. Another of a single plant growing beside a pipe at the foot of a wall, the image tilted, intimate and slightly tentative. These feel different in character from the aerial photographs. Less classified. More encountered. The weed is no longer a specimen. It is a presence. ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!LEG_!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F606a9db8-edd9-4a92-91db-b20f895aa12e_1280x855.jpeg) Kwan Queenie Li - from ‘Weeds’ Captions appear only at the back of the book. Until then, you work out where you are from the surfaces themselves. Li begins her text with etymology. In Indo-European languages, weeds carry connotations of the unwanted, the inferior, the diminutive. In Asian languages, the same vigour that makes them unwelcome is read as vitality and resilience. She notices a conundrum. > *We could say a weed is a weed when it is not wanted, yet weeds frequently grow in abandoned spaces, where no one could really be said to have desires as to what takes place.* If weeds exist outside stable categories, perhaps we should invert the schema and look at them as “anchors, embodiments, objects that determine and describe and define their surroundings.” Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, she asks what it would mean to consider them as conditions “for the exercise of thought.” This is more than a rhetorical move. The weed growing at the base of a traffic cone on a Hong Kong construction site is not just a plant. It is a reading of that site, telling you something about duration, about the pace of urban change, about what has been left alone and for how long. It’s no surprise to encounter [Guy Debord’s Situationism](http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/73?ref=photopedagogy.ghost.io), [psychogeography](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychogeography?ref=photopedagogy.ghost.io) and [Walter Benjamin’s optical unconscious](https://tallisphotography.weebly.com/walter-benjamin.html?ref=photopedagogy.ghost.io) at various points in the book. But, despite its origins as a PhD thesis, *Weeds* is an accessible and entertaining read. Kevin Lynch’s classic urban analysis also makes an appearance, identifying five elements that give a city its legibility: paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks. Li proposes a counter-taxonomy from the weed’s point of view: **covers**, **holes**, **gaps**, **folds**, **cracks** and **corners**. Lynch’s elements are the city presenting itself, designed for human orientation. Li’s are the city as it actually is, the residual spaces, the unplanned gaps, the places where control fails or was never attempted. It is a more honest cartography, if a less comfortable one. And it is, I think, the best thing in the book. It makes you want to go for a walk immediately and look at everything differently. There is a double-page spread of the Wailing Wall, shot straight on, worshippers small at its base, caper bushes scattered through the ancient stonework above them. Li wonders how many prayers the caper bushes have eavesdropped on. They have been growing in those cracks for centuries, apparently. The photograph gives them equal compositional weight with the worshippers. Neither the prayers nor the plants are performing for the camera. They are coexisting, which is its own kind of argument about what matters and what persists. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/09/1fcd2e29-19c6-4560-bf5f-215970b55bb1_1280x1280.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/09/6b827ff9-7f52-4e1f-bba1-f6f91880f61b_1280x1280.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/09/a34d1141-92c0-4472-8c4a-18102c37af10_1280x960.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/09/d5af671d-17e6-44e3-91ae-33405ee1632a_1280x1280.jpg) Kwan Queenie Li - from 'Weeds' At Hiroshima, the [Genbaku Dome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshima%5FPeace%5FMemorial?ref=photopedagogy.ghost.io) is now protected by UNESCO specifically to prevent further weed growth from destabilising the structure. “History is frozen as a critical reminder,” Li writes. “A wound is kept open.” The weeds that would otherwise grow there are held back, the ruin preserved in its ruined state. This is the one place in the book where the weed is explicitly refused. Even absence tells you something. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/09/83adfc3a-c989-4bff-8973-341943e3ffa2_1280x1280.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/09/adef1f72-c4f4-4455-8110-2ebb5b8dcceb_1280x1280.jpg) Kwan Quuenie Li - from 'Weeds' Li is aware of the risks. In her conclusion she cites Sontag’s caution against aesthetic consumerism. > *The wrong gaze could defuse them, their stubborn independence, their exuberant adjacency, and make them mere visual pleasure.* It is an honest admission, and the typological method of most of the photographs sits in slight tension with it. A decade of looking down at weeds from above is a form of classification, however affectionate. The lower vantage points suggest she knows this. They are the moments in the book where the method pauses and something else comes through. The sustained attention the project requires is not the attention of the connoisseur. It is closer to what [Anna Tsing](https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691220550/the-mushroom-at-the-end-of-the-world?srsltid=AfmBOooFNviCxSEphvVTF7F1l9c7bL3hMKAiiMVD3i%5FKAOEAmp%5F6FvZm&ref=photopedagogy.ghost.io) calls the art of noticing, the careful, unhurried attention to organisms that thrive in disturbed landscapes, reading them as indices of wider conditions. Jane Bennett, in [*Vibrant Matter*](https://www.paradigmtrilogy.com/assets/documents/issue-02/jane-banette--vibrant-matter.pdf?ref=photopedagogy.ghost.io), argues for the capacity to be arrested by things, to let the nonhuman act on you before you’ve decided what it means. Li’s weeds are good at this. They are, she writes: > *story-tellers, whispering countless tales of a city’s development, from its material evolution to its climate to its histories of habitation and housing to the social-behavioural currents that shape its contemporary life.* And then, more simply: “Among disorientation, they offer clues and company.” Company is the right word. Not information, not meaning, but company. The weed as a quiet, undemonstrative companion in a city that otherwise refuses to acknowledge you. The book ends with a Chinese proverb: 大象無形. *The greatest image has no form*. And with a question Li says she often asks herself as she presses the shutter. “Is this a weed?” If, like me, you enjoy noticing and sometimes photographing details in the urban landscape you will recognise a version of this question. Is this worth stopping for? Is this interesting or just odd? The question doesn’t have a reliable answer. Li has been asking hers for a decade and seems, from this book, to find it no more settled. That strikes me as the right relationship to have with a subject. The book is an invitation to ask it yourself. --- Thanks for reading PhotoPedagogy! Subscribe for free to receive new posts. [Subscribe](#/portal/signup/free) *These posts will always be free but, if you enjoy reading them, you can support my analogue photography habit, and that of my students, by contributing to the film fund. Thanks to those of you who have already done so. All donations of whatever size are very gratefully received.* [Buy me some film](https://buymeacoffee.com/photopedagogy?ref=photopedagogy.ghost.io)