Dark Dill

Dark Dill has a story. As we were pulling up the plants in the front garden at the end of the season, I couldn’t bear to compost the dill weed that had long ago gone to flower. Instead I cut the dill weed head like a rose and put it in a drinking glass on the kitchen counter. I had no idea what, if anything, I was going to do with it. I kept moving it out of the way until I finally moved it to a sort of anteroom of the kitchen, where it could sit undisturbed. One night as I was passing through, I saw it in this state and knew I had to photograph it right then. The dust from the dillhead flowers had had weeks to accumulate on the countertop, and the stems were in just the right constellation of drooping and erect. I pulled together my 8×10 view camera gear, turned the stove light on in the other room and then did some baffling so it was almost fully dark where the dillhead was. Then I let the 8×10 film “see” the scene for 3 hours. The result was what I’ve often found with hours-long exposures on film — there is a delicacy to the tones that I’ve never gotten in daylight or studio lights, no matter how perfectly exposed.