In the late 1830s, the Welsh botanist John Dillwyn Llewelyn began making photographs of orchids he’d grown at his home near Swansea. Llewelyn’s pictures are thought to be among the first to use the photographic process to identify plant specimens, though he himself found them lacking. “I have amused myself with making Daguerreotype [sic] portraits [of several flowers], and from their exact accuracy they are interesting,” he wrote in an 1842 letter to the director of London’s Kew Gardens, “though the want of color prevents them from being beautiful as pictures.”

Color appeared in photography some decades later, but the question remains: Can photographers capture the vitality of flowers compellingly, innovatively, and beautifully? A new book gives a resounding yes.

Flora Photographica: The Flower in Contemporary Photography by William A. Ewing and Danaé Panchaud (Thames & Hudson, 2022) features 200 photos taken over the past 30 years. The lavishly illustrated book follows its 1991 predecessor, which covered the period from 1835 to 1990. The newest edition features more than 120 artists from 30 countries working with digital and analog photography in a variety of modes, including performance, collage, and textiles.

Η συνέχεια εδώ.