Grassland

Grassland follows a year inside Humboldt County's cannabis-growing community, photographed by an artist working under the pseudonym H. Lee.

Lee lived among growers in the towering redwood country of Northern California, gaining access on the promise that the work would be published under a pseudonym and that anyone who wished to remain unidentified would have their face concealed. The 112-page hardcover moves through a full growing season, from fields and greenhouses to drying houses and trim rooms, presenting cannabis as agricultural labor and cash crop rather than as spectacle, with 75 color plates and captions gathered at the back. Published by Kehrer Verlag in 2014 with texts by Glenn O'Brien and Emily Brady, author of Humboldt: Life on America's Marijuana Frontier, the book appeared as California's decades-old prohibition culture was giving way to legal cultivation.

Working anonymously let Lee document a community still wary of exposure even as its economy moved toward legitimacy, producing an insider's record of a subculture rarely photographed from the inside. Grassland was named among the best photobooks of 2014 by several publications on its release.