Botanical Portraits: Native Argentine Plants Photographs, between Science and Art

Maravillas de nuestras plantas indígenas y algunas exóticas [Wonders of our indigenous and some exotic plants] is a book published in 1935 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, by the German botanist, and andinist Ilse von Rentzell with photographs by the Russian photographer Anatole Saderman. The book articulates scientific research on native plants from different areas of Argentina with artistic photographs in order to broaden its reach to a wide audience. In its pages, there are presented thirty-seven species of plants divided between “indigenous” and “exotic”, along with fifty-eight photographs that portray their flowers, fruits, and leaves.

The book has gained value thanks to the recognition that Saderman's work acquired over the years. The photos he developed for this research were one of his first artistic commissioned work and marked the beginning of what would become an outstanding career as a photographer. Faced with the mission of photographing plants for a botanical publication, Saderman made poetic portraits that give a particular singularity to each of the species. These photos constituted a break within Argentine photography, they differ stylistically from the prevailing pictorialism of the time in local photography, but also, they were made from the idea of series, a concept that in the early 1930s was not yet widespread in photography of those latitudes.

The biographies of the authors involved and the book itself as a cultural object allows us to raise reflections in the light of decolonial questions about artistic practices and their link with ecology, mediality, and mobility. Argentine and Latin American photography is characterized by unique dynamics that differentiate it from the photographic processes of other parts of the world, and even from the visual arts practices. Although Maravillas de nuestras plantas indígenas proposed to use photography as a tool for illustration, its photos made their way out of the pages of the book and expanded to the walls of exhibition halls and the pages of later books; they created a life of their own outside their original scientific purpose. The research project proposes to develop a contemporary revisit of this unique work, until now scarcely explored, to deepen current debates and challenges in the field of art history. It is focused on analyzing the links between botanical studies and photography used as a technical medium for both scientific representation and artistic creation, and also the mechanisms of the scientific, patrimonializing, and aestheticizing functions of the photographic medium. Likewise, the research project investigates the role and scope that this book in general and its photographs in particular had in Argentine photography from the 1930s to the present.

This project is part of the Research and Fellowship Program 4A Laboratory: Art Histories, Archaeologies, Anthropologies, Aesthetics, a cooperation between the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz and the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz.