From Edward Steichen’s practice to contemporary botanical art.

According to the Huntington Library, ‘Botanical art is a type of art that is both artistic and scientific. It can be made using many different media, and the subject can be any type of plant and any parts of a plant, such as flowers, seed pods, roots, leaves, or stems.’

To understand Edward Steichen’s life and work is to understand his practice as an artist as well as a gardener. His passion for delphiniums and his experimentations regarding gardens, flowers and cultivation, place him as a visionary creator who designed new species as artworks. Considering nature and plants as a central piece of artistic endeavours allows us to recognise Steichen as a pioneer, paving the way for many contemporary cultural practices. Today, as we collectively realise the need for humans to reconnect with their surrounding ecosystems, intersections of artistic creation, ecology and botany are expanding. This conversation gathers prominent voices in contemporary culture who cross the spheres of art and ecology, while we unveil lesser-known aspects of Monsieur Steichen.

Biographies

Since the mid-2000s, American artist Lisa Oppenheim (1975, New York) has been developing a body of work that is rooted in the field of photography while also constantly exploring its margins. She often focuses on the unexplored potential of the medium’s artistic, technical and vernacular histories. Oppenheim’s work draws in-depth enquiry that often takes on a life of its own – leading her down ‘a meandering path’ through which a combination of material and more scholarly research enables her projects to come into being. The artist transforms, or ‘reprocesses,’ as she describes it, images from the recent or more distant past by employing various creative mechanisms, both in the darkroom and through other media such as textile and most recently, sculpture.

Sarah Anne McNear has over thirty years of experience in museums and cultural nonprofits, with a specialisation in photography and community-based art education. She has held positions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Allentown Art Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, where she was the Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Fellow in Photography. Most recently, McNear served as the deputy director of Aperture Foundation and the deputy director of the 92nd Street Y's School of the Arts, as well as the director of its Art Center. Previously, she was director of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College Chicago. McNear is the author of several books on photography and has served on advisory committees for the National Endowment for the Arts, the Art in Architecture Program for the U.S. General Services Administration and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. She is currently a board member of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Deer Isle, Maine and Aperture Foundation. McNear lives in New York City.

Luce Lebart is a historian of photography and exhibition curator, associated with the Archive of Modern Conflict collection and freelancer. Her research focuses on the archive and scientific and technical imaginaries, particularly those linked to the natural and atmospheric sciences. Her most recent plant-related exhibitions include Mauvaises herbes !(Centre photographique d'Île-de-France CPIF, 2023) and Natures vivantes (Musée Albert Kahn, 2024). In 2024 she also co-directed the Nature loves to hide edition of the Fotografia Europea festival. Author of publications on forest photography, Lebart has also published on plant-based photography in the book Natures Vivantes (2024, Ateliers EXB / Musée Albert Kahn).

Anna Colin is an independent curator, educator, researcher and gardener. Among other areas of investigation, Anna is engaged with ecocentric social practice, critical pedagogy, alternative modes of instituting, institutional time and participatory landscaping. She directs the MFA Curating and co-directs the Centre for Art Ecology at Goldsmiths, University of London. Anna was a co-founder and director, between 2013 and 2021, of Open School East, an independent art school and community space in London then Margate. She worked as associate curator at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris (2014-20), associate director at Bétonsalon – Centre for art and research, Paris (2011-2) and curator at Gasworks, London (2007-10). With Camille Richert, she curated Chaleur humaine, the 2nd edition of the Art and Industry Triennale (2023-4) at Frac Grand Large and LAAC in Dunkirk. Anna holds a PhD in cultural geography and is currently training in arboriculture.

Paul Lesch is the curator of the Collections Edward Steichen at the Ministry of Culture. Previously the director of the Centre national de l’audiovisuel, he worked there as a scientific collaborator and taught the history of film and media at University of Luxembourg and the Miami University John E. Dolibois European Center. He has written for journals such as Hémecht, Nos Cahiers, Cinéma&Cie., Film History, and Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, and directed the documentary film Call Her Madam (1997).