"Ocean Flowers: Impressions from Nature" at the Drawing Center

Art in America, Feb, 2005 by Leah Ollman

In the conventional version of photographic history--a story of technological advancement over the hand, culminating in images of limitless reproducibility--the photographic images in this show would be no more than footnotes, false starts. Made in the mid-19th century, without camera or lens and mostly as unique prints, they are central, though, to another, fascinating take on the medium's origins. Curators Carol Armstrong and Catherine de Zegher asserted in this absorbing show that early photographic processes were not abrupt departures from manual means of recording, but largely continuous with them, especially with drawing. At its inception, Armstrong writes in the show's excellent catalogue, "Photography was a species belonging to the genus of drawing, and individual photographs were specimens of that species."

Using the vocabulary of natural history (of collection and classification) to describe photography's position underlines how congruent the enterprises were during the 1840s and '50s, the main period covered by the show. "Ocean Flowers" featured a compelling selection of drawings, watercolors, cyanotypes, photogenic drawings, and prints of seashells, feathers and plants, primarily from England, Scotland and India. At the time, the boundary between amateur and professional in the sciences had not yet been fixed, allowing women a more visible role in the gathering and rendering of botanical subjects. The politics and practices of the British Empire also had an impact on the type and character of botanical illustration produced. The most provocative issue considered in the show, however, and the one with the most immediate visual consequence, was the period's multifaceted drive toward authenticity.

Anna Atkins's beguiling cyanotypes of British algae, made by sandwiching a specimen between chemically treated paper and glass, then exposing it to light, had a newly profound indexical relationship to their subjects. The images were precisely to scale, the contours actual traces of the plants themselves. What cameraless photographic images of this sort couldn't offer was the sort of information that gorgeous, watercolor-enhanced drawings like Walter Hood Fitch's abounded in--details of a plant's internal structure; nuanced, descriptive color; a sense of volume. Another process, "nature printing" (made by pressing a specimen into soft lead and creating a copper plate from the impression), married the indexical and the representational, and presented its own particular advantages and constraints in the quest for accuracy.

Which process delivered the most authentic record? Which was to be most trusted, most valued--the image articulated by human agency or the image drawn by nature itself, by the force of light? At what point does the importance of information recede and the power of beauty take over? The questions posed by this intelligent show of convergences and hybrids were manifold.