The ancient Chinese wisdom of emperor Fu Hsi's I Ching or The Book of Changes has served as a guide to human behaviour for millennia. Pondering the highly visual images imparted in the hexagrams of the I Ching, the seeker finds complex responses to questions or situations imbedded in the multiple layers of images that must be deciphered and applied to one's individual circumstances. Among the I Ching's remarkable qualities is its capacity to speak universally through lyrical allegories of the natural and human worlds. Photographers and collaborators Janet Russek and David Scheinbaum have long been students of the I Ching. As landscape photographers accustomed to the teachings of the natural world, the relationship between their work as visual artists and their personal experiences working with the I Ching naturally led them to create this visual companion to the hexagrams. Their photographic interpretation of the Chinese Oracle -- featuring sixty-four duotone landscape portraits paired with text from the I Ching -- offers an additional metaphorical dimension to consultations with the book.

In 1993, Janet Russek began a series of still lifes of ripe squashes, peaches and pears whose rounded forms echoed the plenitude of pregnancy. Using only natural light, she then started to photograph vegetables and roots whose tendrils, reaching for the sun, expressed all of life's striving and aspiration, and finally, the maturing plant, evoking the inevitable downward spiral into decay. In subsequent years, Russek has expanded the project to include pregnant women photographed at close range so that bellies and breasts become almost abstract. Her haunting portraits of dolls explore the darker, more psychologically complex side of childhood and parenting, while the "Memory" series includes photos of significant personal objects that harken to the past, and take this volume full circle. "The Tenuous Stem" also includes an essay, written by art scholar and critic MaLin Wilson-Powell, addressing Russek's creative process.