Although Callahan had little formal training, he credits Ansel Adams, Alfred Stieglitz, and Edward Steichen as his inspirations for pursuing photography professionally. He photographed a wide range of subjects, from nature to architecture to urban movement to highly intimate shots of his family. Callahan merged purism with experimentation to explore both the world around him and the medium of photography itself. Here he captured and printed on high contrast paper the image of a slender weed protruding out of a snowy ground. The minimalist appearance of the work reflects Callahan’s interest in Zen Buddhist drawing and his emphasis on the “technique of seeing.”