Photography and the Botanical World
Yale University Art Gallery
New Haven
Through June 8
At first glance, Lois Conner’s image might read as a great mid-century abstract painting, full of bold shapes, strong lines, and vivid contrasts. But it’s not; it’s a photograph of desiccated plants and their reflections in a still body of water. The image collapses the line between observing nature and interpreting it. It has both documented a moment in time and also given us some commentary on it, a way to feel about it, and to be drawn in.
The image is part of “Photography and the Botanical World,” on view now at Yale University Art Gallery through June 8. In the space of one gallery, the show offers a profound look at the way photographers have related to plants as subjects from the origins of the medium to today, and in so doing, gives a sense of how the relationship between photographers and plants may be changing more generally.
As an accompanying note states, “given photography’s unmatched ability to render fine details, flowers and plant life have been a perennial fascination for photographers throughout the medium’s history.” Starting from the beginning, “the early works shown here bridge the fields of art and science, showcasing photography’s deep-rooted relationship with the natural world.”
The note highlights photographers Anna Atkins and William Henry Fox Talbot, who experimented with contact paper, and moves on to artists in the early 1900s who “involved botanicals in works made in an array of aesthetic styles.” Photographer Karl Blossfeldt “created sculptural surveys of leaves and seedlings, while pictorialists like Edward Steichen and Edwin Hale Lincoln crafted poetic flower studies to elevate photography to the level of traditional art forms.” Many of the early photographs in the show, like Laura Gilpin’s Jimson Flower, showcase the camera’s then-new ability to do what specimen collection cannot — that is, preserve a great deal of detail of the structures of plants while they are still alive, opening up new avenues for scientific observation and aesthetic appreciation.
It’s possible to trace the ways photography becomes more advanced, both technologically and aesthetically, in the approaches the photographers take to their subjects. “Works in vivid color by Audrey Flack and Stephen Shore celebrate flora’s vibrant palette,” the accompanying note states. Flack’s Roman Beauties works on a few different levels. It evokes the oil-painted still lifes of yesteryear with a wry twist; what used to be serious is now something of a sly joke, and one that lands mostly due to Flack’s undeniable artistic skill.
“Meanwhile,” the note continues, “photographers such as Tanya Marcuse and Mitch Epstein feature plant imagery to comment on life’s passage from peak bloom to inevitable decay.” These images can also make the viewer quite aware of the fleeting passage of time itself. Mark Klett’s image of clouds moving over the desert makes excellent use of its static subject amid a tumultuous landscape. The shimmer of a sped-film is palpable; you can feel the plants weathering the storm, and wonder how much more they — or you — could take.
The accompanying note concludes by observing that “the natural world continues to provide fertile ground to a newer generation of artists, including Martine Gutierrez and Atong Atem, who weave botanicals into expressions of personal identity.” In so doing, the youngest artists in the show are continuing a trend in which the photographers are less observers of nature and more participants in nature, perhaps imbued with a greater awareness — as science increasingly shows us — that all living things are connected in multiple ways, and part of a greater whole.
Several of the photographs use plants to create human forms, or use angles and perspectives to blur the line between, say, a plant-print shirt and a shelf at the produce aisle in the grocery store. Likewise, sunflowers make an appearance in a handful of photographs, perhaps most engrossingly in Chuck Close’s image of a sunflower head picked dry but as fascinating as ever, given sharp context in being included in a portfolio of images by photographers drawing attention to the AIDS crisis.
No image in the show, however, combines human and plant forms as fluidly as Hosoe Eikoh’s A Sunflower Child, where a person caught at just the right angle behind a sunflower head effectively creates a new being. Whether one finds it comical, eerie, or just beautiful, the image suggests a mentality toward nature that feels like a possible future, in which we no longer wrestle with the distinction between us and nature, because we know it doesn’t really exist.
