Julieta Pestarino: Botanical Portraits: Photographs of Plants of Argentina, between Scientific Awareness and Art

The book Maravillas de nuestras plantas indígenas [Wonders of our indigenous plants] articulates scientific information on more than thirty species of plants from different areas of Argentina with artistic photographs that portray their flowers, fruits, and leaves in order to reach a wide audience. It was published in Argentina in 1935 by the German botanist Ilse von Rentzell, with photographs by Anatole Saderman. Considering earlier photographs of plants that were probably known to the authors, this lecture will explore how these photographs were used both by botanists in graphic media for the mass dissemination of scientific knowledge about native plants, and by the photographer to further his career in the local artistic photographic medium.

Julieta Pestarino, Ph.D. in History and Theory of Arts from the University of Buenos Aires, is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the interdisciplinary programme 4A Laboratory: Art Histories, Archaeologies, Anthropologies, Aesthetics (June 2023–December 2023). She is an anthropologist, art historian, and curator specialised in Latin American Photography. Her research focuses on the history of photography and aesthetic practices relating to photographs as objects and images. She is an Associate Researcher at the Gino Germani Research Institute of the University of Buenos Aires. Her doctoral thesis, which she did as a CONICET fellow, reconstructs many aspects on “La Carpeta de los Diez”; a group of European photographers based in Buenos Aires during the 1950s, in particular how the group collaborated in the construction of a local and Latin American photographic modernity. Pestarino's studies were supported by scholarships from AUGM (Brazil, 2012), Erasmus+ (Czech Republic, 2018), Casa de Velázquez (Spain, 2019), and the Italian-Latin American Institute (Italy, 2019), among others. She was a Graduate Intern 2021-2022 in the Curatorial Department (Latin American Art) of the Getty Research Institute (USA) and was part of the Bauhaus Lab Global Modernism Studies 2023 (Germany). Her book Modern Practices. Photography and Groupality in La Carpeta de los Diez was published in 2023 by ArtexArte Fund in Buenos Aires.