Flora photographica: the flower in contemporary photography

Abstract

"For those with a historical curiosity, which is to say an interest in the photography of flowers before the period covered by this book (1990-2020), we suggest a look at Flora Photographica: Masterpieces of Flower Photography from 1835 to the Present (1991), which opens with Fox Talbot's simple photograms of the 1830s; Anna Atkins's iconic cyanotypes of British and other flowering plants of 1854; and an extremely rare floral daguerrotype (c. 1845); and then moves through all manner of nineteenth-century experimentation to austere modernist masterpieces by Blossfeldt, Edward Steichen (a great gardener and plant breeder as well as photographer), Cunninhgam and many others. The anthology ends with the melancholy studies of dying plants by Chris Enos, the hilariously artificial hybrids of Joan Fontcuberta and the stylish, almost aggressively erotic forms of Robert Mapplethorpe. Readers of the present book will find much continuity with the first volume, but will undoubtedly be struck by a major difference, a logical consequence of time's passage: the first book was 90 per cent black and white; the present volume is 90 per cent colour. As for the digital 'revolution', the reader will most likely conclude that although much has shifted in that direction, analogue has more than held its own. The Flora Photographica of 1991 was also more Eurocentric, with the majority of contributors coming from France, Britain, Germany and the United States, and only a few from afield, [...] the present study represents photographers from around thirty countries"--Page 12, Introduction.