Botanical photographs prompt evaluation of naturality

For Christmas this year I received a day planner with old botanical and zoological illustrations in full color. I’m very fond of it, because every week it delivers another image, and each new image contrasts with the economical calendar space to remind me of a natural world whose variety and beauty seem to lie just outside my civilized life, contrary but not lost to it. Though nature is not my home, it remains available as a foreign destination, which explains why such illustrations make appealing postcards. In addition to such exoticism, I have the nostalgic pleasure of knowing that these images were produced under conditions that have since expired. Science now has different techniques for documenting the diversity of species, though art has become far less bound to representation. But what has nature become for us since we began to treat it as the subject matter of a conjoined scientific and artistic practice? “Ancestral Garden,” an exhibition of photographs by Gregory Vershbow at the Slifka Center, suggests an intriguing answer: Here, nature approaches the realm of science fiction.

“Ancestral Garden” is a collection of still life images from Vershbow’s “The Alchemist’s Tree,” a photographic narrative about three scientists in late nineteenth century New England who set out to transform existing plants into long-since extinct species by means of grafting. Thus, although there are no people in the exhibited photos, the human presence is fully apparent. And the story that the images purport to tell is, in fact, Vershbow’s own invention, an artificial history. The photographs appear to be documents when they are more like excerpts from a novel. This is photography pretending to be what we think photography really is: visual representation made accurate by science. But here the camera looks at the power of science itself to direct the course of nature. The question is whether the products of science are indeed natural, or whether, like these photographs, they are inevitably fake. Beyond this dilemma lies an important question: What would be the difference?

We often speak about art, nature, and science as though they were three distinct things, albeit with some obvious and important connections. Unlike paintings or computers or theories or cities, nature is not thought to be a human creation. We are perhaps inclined to define nature by what it is not, through reference to what seems intuitively unnatural. Nature is a puzzle for both science and art. While art seems open to imagination, science is concerned with correspondence between the ideas it presents and their correlation to reality. Art takes interest in nature’s aesthetic power; science demands its truth. Both art and science, then, grapple with the exchange between nature and human activity. But if such exchange is possible, the question of the boundary between the natural and the artificial cannot be avoided for long. Even if we didn’t create nature, the natural world may be something we help to shape. Human production, which seems decisive, is itself not so easily separated from natural forces.

In Vershbow’s photographs, the areas of highest resolution tend to be where we see plants subjected to the scrutiny of human-made implements: submerged in glass jars, fixed between glass disks under the microscope, magnified beneath glass lenses. There are prodding tongs and menacing scissors. But though these mechanical interjections lend the observer the feel of objective distance, the glass makes us aware of the process of looking: We receive the most information about nature when we view it under artificial conditions. The only photo that appears to be an exception to this, “Pseudo fern grafted to fern,” simply depicts a close-up of an already modified specimen. The degree of detail in this plant portrait is itself enabled by the camera, whose optical precision greatly exceeds that of the human eye. What nature are we looking at?

If we recall that even these scenes of scientific inquiry are imaginary, then we have to consider that what appear to be the tools of science are in fact props, fashioned by Vershbow himself out of “a combination of raw materials and artifacts from the late nineteenth century [including] a lot of civil war medical equipment.” The props themselves don’t attempt to conceal this construction—the instruments often appear homemade and irregular or otherwise shoddy, and their function is not always clear. Loose earth and water spill out of containers and contaminate the experimental work surfaces. The scientific work threatens to be compromised by inexactitude and a lack of control. And then there are the plants themselves, which in the story are already supposed to stand at the margins of nature but in reality seem even more artificial than the narrative implies. Vershbow constructed them out of living and non-living materials.

The layering of fictions and the ambiguity of artificial and natural elements crystallize, however, into something more than just the photographs’ conceptual play. This something is mesmerizing beauty, which is at once sharply focused and difficult to locate. Stunning images of backlit plants, submerged in water and contained in glass cylinders, bring together the things we perceive as natural and unnatural into a unified experience. Seeing the plant means looking through the glass and through the water by means of artificial light, via its interaction with the mechanism of the camera. The photographs present the beauty of still-life as an appearance in which we cannot tell natural beauty from the beauty of human-made conditions.

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