This photograph is from a series that I am working on called "The Kudzu project." Kudzu may prove to be among the least appropriate symbols of the Southern landscape and the planet’s future. But its mythic rise and fall should alert us to the careless secondhand way we sometimes view the living world, and how much more we might see if we just looked a little deeper. Kudzu is “the ultimate icon for the South a dramatic metaphor for just about every issue you can imagine within Southern Culture. For many, the vivid depictions of Kudzu had simply become the defining imagery of the landscape, only as palms might represent Florida or cactus Arizona. But for others, Kudzu was a vine with a story to tell, symbolic of strange hopelessness that had crept across the landscape, a lush and intemperate tangle the South would never escape.