An article in New Scientist in June 1959 described Sir Edward James Salisbury as a “prophet and propagandist of botany”. Inspired by the plants that grew wild in his native Hertfordshire, he became a pioneering ecologist, lecturer, author – The Living Garden (1935) was a bestseller – and, from 1943-56, director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. He was also a keen photographer and a large collection of his glass plate negatives – natural landscapes and individual plant studies – was recently discovered in the Natural History Museum archives. It is the conceptual starting point for this ambitious book by the contemporary French photographer Chrystel Lebas.
For Field Studies, Lebas literally followed in Salisbury’s footsteps, revisiting the landscapes he had photographed in the 1920s and 1930s and searching out the plants he had isolated and documented on light sensitive paper. Her botanical pilgrimage took her to the Trossachs, the Cairngorms and the Moray Firth in Scotland and to Blakeney Point in Norfolk, each location pinpointed by a global mapping system in the accompanying caption. On her walks, Lebas was often accompanied by a contemporary botanical expert, which, she writes, enabled her to realise that “my remit was very different from Salisbury’s. He was a scientist disguised as a photographer. Was I becoming a photographer disguised as a scientist?”
It is this dynamic that underpins the book, which is, in essence, an investigation of a landscape that now has such a heavy human footprint as to no longer be “natural” in the way Salisbury would have understood the term. For all that, Lebas’s images have a kind of heightened elementalism, being dark both in their colour tones and their atmosphere. She uses a panoramic camera and often shoots at dusk when the light quality in these still, quiet places can be almost otherworldly. The air of mystery, even mysticism, that hovers around some of Salisbury’s indistinct glass plate landscapes is echoed here in the soft tones and muted light. Interestingly, one of Lebas’s touchstones is not an artist, but a philosophical writer, Gaston Bachelard, whose poetic musings on intimate spaces, reverie and shadow also inform her approach.
The book culminates with a series of photograms – a picture produced on light-sensitive paper without using a camera – that pay homage to Salisbury’s earlier photographs of isolated species. Lebas manipulated the colour filtration on her enlarger to “change the way the plant emanates from the paper’s surface”. The word “emanate” is well-chosen: her images exude an atmosphere that hovers somewhere between the scientific and the mysterious. The material landscape of plants, trees, grasses and dunes recorded so meticulously by Salisbury may have changed dramatically but, in these photographs at least, it maintains an air of mystery and otherness.
A word, too, for the book’s design, which nods to the field studies element of the undertaking in its handmade aesthetic. Throughout, Lebas’s beautifully printed, richly hued photographs are presented alongside Salisbury’s small black and white glass plate images. For a photobook, there is a lot of text – perhaps one too many academic essays – but otherwise this is a deftly plotted journey into some of Britain’s surviving wild places and one that alerts us, in a quiet way, to their fragility. Sir Edward James Salisbury, one suspects, would have approved.
An exhibition, Chrystel Lebas: Regarding Nature, is at the Photographers’ Gallery, London W1 until 5 August
Field Studies is published by fw: books (£49.50) and distributed by Idea Books. It is also available through the Photographers’ Gallery bookshop
