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ABSTRACT
I explore how a historic image archive can be re-worked through collaborative artistic-scientific practice, and how photography can be ‘re-performed’ as a strategy to observe an environmental change. The focus is on a project by the photographer Chrystel Lebas, who between 2011 and 2017 worked in collaboration with botanists from the Natural History Museum, London. The collaborators used historic and contemporary photographs for seasonal observations in the field. Their specific interest was in the potential for using historic visual ecological records to investigate environmental change as observed now.
The paper explores the hybridization of technical, aesthetic and embodied knowledge, the application of montage and the tacit creation of a visual framework for observation. It draws attention to the potential inflexibility in interpretation inherent in the accepted systematic practice of placing ecological records within a herbarium in a natural history collection. Secondly, it illustrates the neglected potential of photographic collections within scientific research.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributors
Bergit Arends is a visual art curator and researcher with particular interest in multi-disciplinary practices. Bergit curated the contemporary art programme at the NHM London from 2005 to 2013, which included exhibitions, commissions, and international artists’ residencies, among others by Daniel Boyd, Hu Yun, and Sunoj D. Among the exhibitions were the touring group show Galápagos (2012–2013) and After Darwin: Contemporary Expressions (2009); as well as Lucy + Jorge Orta: Amazonia; Mark Dion: Systema Metropolis (2007); and The Ship: The Art of Climate Change (2006). For the museum's Treasures Gallery she commissioned the permanent installation TREE (2009) by Tania Kovats to mark the 150 years of the publication of On the Origins of Species and the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth.
Previous collaborative work environments include MRC National Institute for Medical Research (1996–2000), where she initiated and curated the first art programme within a scientific research institution, and the Wellcome Trust (1999–2004).
Bergit was doctoral Reid Scholar in the departments of Geography and Drama & Theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she researched contemporary art, archives and environmental change in the age of Anthropocene. She currently curates two new visual art commissions for the Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin, and is Manager of Research & Public History at the Science Museum.
Notes
1 Mark Spencer, interview with the author, 17 December 2014.
2 Chrystel Lebas, interview with the author, 24 November 2014.
3 Mark Spencer, interview with the author, 17 December 2014.
4 Mark Spencer, interviews with the author, 17 December 2014 and 15 May 2015.
5 The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, UK branch, funded this project as part of its support of the contemporary art programme at the Natural History Museum. Through the grant period between autumn 2013 and December 2014 Lebas and Castillo were both paid honoraria to research the Salisbury archive collection. I was paid a curatorial fee to work with the team and to seek external opportunities to publicize and potentially exhibit the project outcomes.
6 Photographers Mark Klett, JoAnn Verburg, Ellen Manchester, Gordon Bushaw and Rick Dingus re-photographed the landscape of the American West, based on photographs by surveyors taken for the United States Geological Survey, in particular Timothy O'Sullivan. The present-day photographers analysed the photographs to determine the installation of the camera, tilt, swing of the camera and lens settings to bring to the fore the technical decisions made to achieve the survey images (see Wells Citation2011 and Wilder Citation2009). The images of the follow-on projects Third View: a rephotographic survey of the American West (1998–2000) are documented on their website. Retrieved from https://www.thirdview.org/3v/home/index.html [accessed on 21 December 2017].
7 Chrystel Lebas, interview with the author, 24 November 2014.
8 Kath Castillo, Chrystel Lebas and Mark Spencer, group interview with the author, 17 December 2014.
9 Mark Spencer, interview with the author, 15 May 2015.
10 Lebas never found the camera Salisbury used, nor any technical reference to it, but assumes the use of a standard field camera with gelatine dry plate negatives from the early twentieth century.
11 Mark Spencer, interview with the author, 17 December 2014.
12 Many questions remain unresolved on Salisbury's observations and choices made in the field. So far we have not found notes on the camera he used nor any field notes.
13 Chrystel Lebas, interview with the author, 24 November 2014.
14 Kath Castillo, Chrystel Lebas and Mark Spencer, interview with the author, 17 December 2014.
15 Chrystel Lebas, interview with the author, 24 November 2014.
16 Mark Spencer, interview with the author, 15 May 2015.