From the very beginnings of photography, plants have been both a subject of study and a source of inspiration. Over time, the relationship between botany and the photographic medium has shifted – shaped by new visual technologies, ecological perspectives, and critical reflections on how science, colonialism, class and gender are intertwined.
Today, artists are engaging with nature in renewed ways – with plants, fungi, soil, insects and other non-human life forms. In this symposium, scholars and artists will share perspectives on how botany and photography intersect, and how these encounters open up new ways of thinking about both art and the world around us.
Program
12.30: Welcome and introduction by Nina Mangalanayagam and Louise Wolthers
12.45:
Joy Gregory
Caroline Elgh
Conversation
Break & coffee
14.20:
Hendrik Zeitler
Hanne Hammer Stien
Conversation
Short break
15.40:
Karin Wagner
Tom Pope (performance)
Conversation
The organizers:
Nina Mangalanayagam is an artist and a senior Lecturer at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg,
Louise Wolthers is an art historian, curator and Head of Research at the Hasselblad Foundation.
Abstracts and bios:
Joy Gregory
I will speak about the exhibition project Seeds of Empire, created in collaboration with composer Philip Miller. This immersive installation weaves together still and moving images, drawing, text, objects, and sound. The project emerges from extensive research into the histories of slavery and colonialism in Jamaica, spanning from 1492 to the present. Central to the work is the use of visual and textual material from historical figures such as Hans Sloane—the physician, naturalist, and collector whose vast holdings formed the foundation of the British Museum and the Natural History Museum. Drawing inspiration from Sloane’s Jamaican journals, which detail his collection of plants and specimens, Seeds of Empire reflects on the complex entanglements of Jamaica’s history.
Joy Gregory is an acclaimed British artist whose socially engaged practice spans photography, video, and historic print processes. She is the editor of Shining Lights, the first critical anthology of Black women photographers in the UK, and this autumn her work will be celebrated in a major retrospective at Whitechapel Art Gallery.
Caroline Elgh:
From a coastal positioning this talk explores ecological imaginations in art and ways of doing amphibian research at the sea edge. Departing from interdisciplinary gender studies and blue humanities, an academic field that brings humanities and natural science into conversation, I zoom in on entanglements between humans and seaweeds. Through my own more-than-human fieldwork where I snorkel and learn to know seaweeds, I discuss artistic practices, marine botany and science fiction. Here at the intersection of theory and practice, real and imaginative, land and sea, wet and dry, human and nonhuman, art and science new symbioses and ecological sensibilities may emerge where humans are part of nature, instead of separated from it.
Caroline Elgh is an art curator and cultural researcher at TEMA: Gender Studies, Linköping University. She works transdisciplinary at the intersection of visual art and marine science.
Hanne Hammer Stien:
Using the concept of care as a starting point, I will explore approaches to thinking about and doing photography that foster ecological consciousness while raising awareness of the relationship between photography and colonialism. My work on the article “Økobevisst fotografi. Fremvekst av nye praksiser og tenkemåter” (co-written with Marthe Tolnes Fjellestad, published in Periskop in 2024) and a special issue of Photographies titled Photography and Care (published in 2024) forms the basis of this talk.
Hanne Hammer Stien is an art historian and curator. She is a professor at the Academy of Art at UiT The Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø, where she teaches in the BA and MA programs in Fine Art.
Hendrik Zeitler:
I will be showing images from my ongoing work with cultivated plants that have spread in the forests and along roads in my home area of Hammarkullen. Some of the plants are considered invasive, some are seen as almost natural elements of our flora.
Another work that I will be talking about is my cameraless images of, among other things, plants taken in the greenhouse of the Gothenburg Botanical Garden, near my home and in the Swedish mountains. These images differ from all other photography in that they are immediate photographic impressions where the slightest change over time can be traced.
Hendrik Zeitler, born in Hamm, Germany in 1975, holds a master's degree in photography from the University of Gothenburg. He works as an artist and photographer and teaches in Gothenburg.
Tom Pope:
Almost Nothing But Blue Ground is a project initiated by Tom Pope and Matthew Benington, exploring the work and life of Anna Atkins.
While researching it came to light that Anna Atkins and Anne Dixon’s collaborative book Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Ferns, 1853, contains many ferns from Jamacia; this led to the discovery that Atkins' husband and father-in-law both owned at least 8 plantations in Jamaica. The findings show Atkins benefited from the slave trade and colonial project. The discovery led the project to focus on areas of the Victorian fern craze, land ownership, capitalism, the colonial project, in particular, its links with botany, planation’s, plundering of foreign lands.
The research informed a performative week-long walk in 2021 from Atkins' house in Tonbridge to Dixon's in Ferring. On the walk, Pope and Benington dragged a trolley that carried photographic darkroom equipment. The prints, archive material, research and objects created during the walk or discovered while researching forms the bases of a performative lecture.
Tom Pope works in performance, photography, and object based art. Traditionally trained in photography at the Royal College of Art, play is at the core of his practice.
Pope lives in Hastings, UK.
Karin Wagner:
Digitised herbaria and photographic inscriptions
Digitised botanical collections are a major resource for biodiversity research. When herbaria are digitised, what kind of pictures are produced? What kind of knowledge can be extracted from them? In this presentation I will reflect on the different layers of photography that are involved in the process of digitisation of herbaria. Neither photographs nor dried plants are “pure” information – they have material qualities that must be taken into account. The pressing and drying of plants can be regarded as a photographic process; in the same way as black-and-white photographs are flat and colourless, the dried plants become flat and also lose their original colours. Is a dried plant a representation of a living plant? Can it be a “real” object and at the same time an image of itself? These and other question will take us back into the history of photography and connect past to present.
Karin Wagner is a professor in art history and visual studies at the University of Gothenburg. Her main research interests are photography, digital media and design.
