From up close, photographer Erik Christiansen can capture the glistening stalks on the surface of cannabis flowers, called trichomes, that store the cannabinoids that give the plant its mind-altering properties.Photography by Erik Christiansen
In the hand, marijuana shimmers, its surfaces dusted with cannabinoid-containing crystals. But through the macro lens of Erik Christiansen, those crystals reveal themselves as a dense mat of trichomes suspended on translucent appendages that, on some strains, glow with the pinks and purples of the plant’s leaves. It is a fairyland of pearls laced with THC.
“I think it looks beautiful,” says Mr. Christiansen, 33, who has fashioned himself into a career inconceivable in the United States not long ago – a professional cannabis photographer – by bringing technical savvy and a new vision of what cannabis can look like.
This inner world of marijuana was once largely off-limits, with illicit growers wary of cameras.
But with cannabis firmly in the mainstream as legalization rolls across the U.S., the industry is looking for new ways to sell a plant and a product at a time of furious competition, with new companies and new strains flooding the market.
With that has come a new approach to sales. Cannabis marketing “used to be geared primarily toward a young, hipper, smoker-stoner crowd,” says Tim Blake, a California cannabis pioneer who founded the Emerald Cup, which Rolling Stone dubbed “the Academy Awards of Cannabis.” Now a growing industry is chasing new audiences: older users, people in new global markets, those looking to try something they may not have considered before it was legal.
Some companies have chased subcultures, such as gaming, or tried to elevate their profile by securing celebrity backing.
Others have sought to create a new image for marijuana.
Weed is the stuff of reefer jokes. But Mr. Christiansen, and the companies using images like the ones he creates, are turning cannabis into something sensual and bejewelled. Increasingly, that’s something the industry wants: from the covers of High Times to the product pages at industry heavyweights such as Cookies.
The many strains of marijuana lend it a complexity and variety that make it visually striking in ways few other agricultural products can match. Far from the green leaf that has been the icon of marijuana, the cannabis world includes strains with leaves of blood-red, flowers of deep purple and buds covered in sticky, wet trichomes.
“There’s something that’s just almost sexy about it in nature,” says Nat Pennington, the founder and chief executive officer of Humboldt Seed Co. To gaze at it from up close is to evoke, he says, a “botany of desire.”
Close-ups of four cannabis strains, clockwise from top left: Green Bodhi's Sour Tangle, Str8organics Papaya, Harvest Moon Gardens's GMO Leaf Taco and Benson Arbor Road Dawg.
The industry calls it “bud porn,” and Mr. Christiansen has been among its more enthusiastic creators. It began when he first saw the deep scarlet tones of a strain called Granddaddy Purple. It was the “first time I’d ever seen really good weed. And being a photographer, I was like – I gotta shoot this,” Mr. Christiansen says. “This looks so crazy.”
Mr. Christiansen has photographed cannabis full-time since 2016, always searching for something new or unique. It’s “the diversity, really,” he says. “This curiosity of wanting to explore cannabis. So many unique smells. So many different looks.” Plants grown indoors look different from those outside. A grower’s choices in lights and temperature affect how it looks.
For companies, that diversity poses its own set of problems. There are more cannabis brands today than ever before, says Jared Mirsky, who started Wick & Mortar, the world’s first cannabis-focused creative agency, 16 years ago. He has worked with hundreds of brands. That profusion has made marketing critical. “Weed doesn’t sell itself,” Mr. Mirsky says. “People aren’t really loyal to brands, and for obvious reasons. When so many brands are emerging every day, why wouldn’t you want to try more?”
The industry is also afflicted by ambition. “Have we seen the first real Coca-Cola of cannabis?” asks Jigar Patel, co-CEO of NorCal Cannabis Co. “I don’t think we have. And I think that’s the goal.”
What that means, however, is that too many companies are “trying to be everything to everyone,” Mr. Mirsky says. He advocates niche marketing, pointing to a brand that is selling to gamers by marketing cannabis experiences as “pause,” “play” and “reset” – and joints as “joysticks.”
All of it is complicated by the immense complexity of rules around cannabis advertising, a patchwork of rules. Billboards are allowed in some places but not others. Policies around packaging vary widely. Online, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube regularly shut down cannabis accounts for reasons that are not always clear. In 2019, NorCal Cannabis hired Joel Lunenfeld, the former of head of global brand strategy at Twitter as its head of marketing. He has already left the company. “Cannabis wasn’t quite ready” for sophisticated digital marketing, at least “until some of the larger media companies change their stance,” Mr. Patel says. It’s confusing enough that Mr. Mirsky sells a guide to marketing on social media.
This strain is called The Wedding Crasher.
But pictures of cannabis flowers, including those made by Mr. Christiansen, don’t usually encounter problems on Instagram.
And so his kind of images – what he calls nugshots – are gaining currency across the industry.
High Times, the magazine that has famously put John Lennon, Snoop Dogg and Willie Nelson on its front, has devoted most of its recent covers to jewel-like images of cannabis.
“They want to romance that,” says Kenneth Loo, CEO of Chapter 2, a leading cannabis public-relations firm. Marijuana art is very magnetic to the culture of people who are interested in this product.”
It’s partly a rebuttal to quality problems that have worried users. “The customer is looking at it and saying, just give me the raw stuff,” Mr. Loo says.
It’s also an attempt by companies to escape prices that, with a glut of supply, have plunged to loss-making depths. That has set farmers and executives in search of higher-end customers. “What is necessary to do that? Just like an expensive car: beautiful photography,” Mr. Loo says.
A seed from Compound Genetics' Super Sonic Grey strain.
Shooting buds up close is not simple. As a camera lens magnifies, it also makes the field of vision more shallow, placing just a tiny slice into focus. To create an image of an entire bud – or nug – requires photographing hundreds of those slices and then assembling them together to create an image where the entire bud springs into sharp relief.
Focus stacking, as the technique is called, has been simplified over the years with hardware and software tools. But when Mr. Christensen started as a college student without much money, he repurposed the tracking assembly from inside a CD-ROM – the part that moves the laser – and used that as a rail on which he could slide his camera with some precision, pushing it along with his finger to capture each slice of the image. Images took long enough to process that he would typically leave his computer to work overnight.
Today, he uses a device made for eyeglass manufacturing that allows him to adjust his camera in steps of 0.2 microns, a fraction of the 75-micron width of a human hair. His photographs of seeds take him so close that he can see iridescence where different wavelengths of light reflect and refract inside microscopic ridges. In some close-ups, he can see movement inside the cells – cytoplasmic streaming.
A very close-up view of a trichome from Green Bodhi's Purple Pakistani Chitral strain.
He also creates moving images that spin a bud in macro view. A single one of those images can take 10,900 pictures and 115 gigabytes of data – the equivalent of nearly 40 high-definition movies. Just gathering the pictures can take six hours, long enough that he has had to find ways to keep the plant from wilting.
Using fresh buds is so important that he typically does his photography at a grow operation, where he can capture images of a plant immediately after it has been cut.
His images show the rich complexity of a plant with few parallels as a consumer product. Grocery stores may stock a few types of apples or grapes. The cannabis industry has created thousands of strains. Mr. Christiansen flips through his archive, displaying a picture of poinsettia-like Papaya, the pink-flecked trichome bases in Star Pupil, the royal purple hues of Forbidden Fruit.
What he hasn’t been able to do is visualize what a particular plant may taste like. Hemp, with minimal THC levels, “looks exactly the same” as potent strains, he says. He uses more traditional ways to assess that.
“In a perfect world,” Mr. Christiansen says, “I get to try everything that I shoot.”
Trichomes cover the bottom surface of a Star Pupil leaf.
Our Morning Update and Evening Update newsletters are written by Globe editors, giving you a concise summary of the day’s most important headlines. Sign up today.