A Focus on Plants: Photography’s Long Infatuation with Botany

With eye-catching flora at every turn, each garden at The Huntington is a shutterbug magnet. Thanks to digital technology, it’s possible for anyone with a smartphone to create galleries of captivating plant images in an afternoon. But this is just the latest chapter in a long love affair between photographers and plants—many examples of which are documented in The Huntington’s collections.

William Henry Fox Talbot’s landmark The Pencil of Nature (1844) was the first commercially published book with both text and photographs. Among the images were a variety of compositions, including landscapes, still lifes, and botanical subjects. At one point, Talbot (1800–1877) proposed collaborating on a photographic survey of plants with his friend William Jackson Hooker, the first director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. His earliest experiments were photograms that he created by placing items—often flowers or leaves—directly onto photosensitive paper and then exposing the composition to sunlight. When he later removed the botanical item, a light impression of it in reverse remained on the paper’s darker ground. As with other early forms of photography, such as daguerreotype and ambrotype, each exposure produced a single image, whether captured on a light-sensitized metal plate or a sheet of paper. But Talbot would change that: His great innovation was a technique that produced a reverse image on paper—a negative—that could then be used to reproduce positive copies of that single image many times.

Although Talbot had worked out the positive-negative photographic printing technique, methods for making the results lightfast, or stable when exposed to additional light, remained a challenge. About 40 copies of The Pencil of Nature survive, and some images have withstood the test of time more vividly than others. A case in point is the ghost of a leaf from a plant in the Parsley family (Apiaceae) that is barely visible in The Huntington’s edition.

In his introductory remarks to The Pencil of Nature, Talbot assures readers that any shortcomings in his photographs arise “chiefly from our want of sufficient knowledge of [nature’s] laws. When we have learnt more, by experience … they will surely find their own sphere of utility, both for completeness of detail and correctness of perspective.”

Among Talbot’s contemporaries was British botanist Anna Atkins (1799–1871). Both Talbot and John Herschel (1792–1871), inventor of the cyanotype photographic method, were family friends of Atkins’ father, the chemist and mineralogist John George Children (1777–1852). By the time she was in her 20s, Atkins was an accomplished artist and had contributed illustrations to Children’s English translation of French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s Genera of Shells (1833). She became interested in using photography to document plant specimens and learned to create cyanotypes in Herschel’s laboratory. The iron compounds used in this technique produced dramatic blue-and-white images, and because the images were contact prints, like the photograms that Talbot had made, they sometimes captured fine details of plant anatomy, which was part of their appeal for Atkins.

Atkins created thousands of cyanotypes and was the first person to use photographs to illustrate a botanical survey, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843). In the book, she notes that “the difficulty of making accurate drawings of objects so minute as many of the Algae and Confervae [a type of algae], has induced me to avail myself of Sir John Herschel’s beautiful process of Cyanotype, to obtain impressions of the plants themselves, which I have much pleasure in offering to my botanical friends.”

Throughout the rest of the 19th century, photographers continued to expand the “sphere of utility” that Talbot predicted. Carleton E. Watkins (1829–1916)—a childhood friend of Henry E. Huntington’s uncle, Collis—is best known for his remarkable large-format landscapes of the American West. To create these, he hired a cabinetmaker to build a camera large enough to accommodate the 18-by-22-inch glass negatives (“mammoth plates”) he used. Among his botanical subjects were several signature plants of the Southwest—including cacti, agave, yuccas, and palms—that, at the time, were still curiosities for many Americans. Watkins also tapped into a popular trend of the day: stereoscopic photos taken with a double-lens camera. The resulting prints produced a three-dimensional effect when seen through a special handheld viewer.

Like Watkins, German photographer Karl Blossfeldt (1865–1932) worked with a camera constructed specifically for his purposes. He pioneered macrophotography using a camera of his own design with a bellows nearly 3 feet long. The bellows was an accordion-like structure that connected the lens to the camera aperture. Increasing the distance between the lens and the photographic plate inside the camera made it possible to capture extreme close-ups of his subjects. Blossfeldt then used a complex technique called photogravure to print his photos. Photogravure involves transferring the negative images to copper plates and then processing and printing the images using the same intaglio printing method as etchings.

The 120 plates comprising Blossfeldt’s 1928 Urformen der Kunst (Art Forms in Nature) include common plants found in Europe and Asia as well as unusual specimens that he encountered during his travels. His early training as a sculptor informed every image, highlighting the anatomical structures and textures he saw in plants. His use of negative space is often striking, as are the geometric forms accentuated in his compositions, a reflection of his belief that the archetypes of human design originate in the natural world.

Edwin Hale Lincoln (1848–1938) also found inspiration in the beauty of plants, although his mission was more holistic. A passionate conservationist, he felt compelled to catalog the vanishing wildflowers, trees, and orchids of his native New England. His richly detailed and deftly composed portraits are records of these species. Some images convey the cycle of life with plants in different stages of bloom—from bud to seedhead. Others highlight their exquisite sculptural qualities. Lincoln’s habitat photos are even more remarkable because they were made using an early type of 8-by-10-inch large-format box camera that had no mechanical shutter—a cumbersome apparatus for fieldwork. To take a picture, Lincoln had to load the camera, shroud it with a blanket, and then position and unveil it for the appropriate exposure time.

For portraits, Lincoln dug up the plants and carefully transported them to his studio, where he tended them until they reached the developmental stages he wanted to capture. He photographed them under natural light in front of a blank backdrop and then—because he did not want to further impinge on dwindling wild plant populations—returned them to their original locations.

In the introduction to Orchids of the North Eastern United States (1931), Lincoln wrote, “One purpose only has been considered in compiling these plates—to preserve in permanent form a perfect record of a native botanical family which is the victim of its own loveliness, and is already but a name to many who dwell beside its former haunts.” His purpose may have been documentation, but the artistry with which he pursued his mission resulted in images that enchant the viewer and embody the concern that Lincoln felt for his subjects.

For thousands of years, humans have documented plants using various media, but photography provided a uniquely intimate perspective with compelling immediacy.

“The distinction between scientific specimen and artful photograph is often blurred,” said Linde Lehtinen, The Huntington’s Philip D. Nathanson Curator of Photography. “The delicate shapes, structures, and details of plants inspired many to create still lifes and explore photography as an art form. Photography can also serve as a method of scientific investigation that reveals new understandings and views of nature. This reciprocal relationship between botany and photography has produced some of the most compelling discoveries and innovations in the history of the medium.”

Sandy Masuo is the botanical content specialist at The Huntington.