The Latin phrase “Ars longa, vita brevis” means art is long, life is short. Edwin Hale Lincoln made his life’s work demonstrating the particular truth of those words. Few living things are less enduring than wild flowers (or as lovely). Yet the photographs Lincoln took of them are so precise and exactingly rendered as to give each specimen a nearly geological heft.
“Wild Flowers of New England” — exhibition titles don’t come any more straightforward — consists of three dozen Lincoln photographs, a number of large-size volumes of Lincoln photographs, several sets of pressed specimens he preserved, and a handful of examples of work from both other botanical photographers and illustrators. The show runs at the Boston Athenaeum through Sept. 5. The Athenaeum’s Lauren Graves curated.
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Lincoln’s own vita wasn’t brevis. Born in 1848, he served in the Civil War, as a drummer boy and surgeon’s assistant, and died a year before the start of World War II. He didn’t become a photographer until he was nearly 40. A series of commissions to photograph mansions in Newport, R.I., led to similar assignments in the Berkshires. He moved there in 1893 and began specializing in wild flowers. He’d ultimately publish “Wild Flowers of New England Photographed From Nature” in eight volumes, and “Orchids of the North Eastern United States.”
Lincoln used a view camera, which provides an impressive degree of detail. He then developed his glass-plate negatives as platinum prints, which are notorious for their difficulty getting right in the darkroom and prized for their lustrous beauty when successfully printed.
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The respect Lincoln accorded his subject matter is evident in the images and extended beyond his studio. He would search woods and meadows for suitable specimens, uproot the plants, take them back to be photographed, then replant them in their original setting. If asked, he would decline to say where he’d found his specimens, so as to protect them.
The Athenaeum shows its own respect for these subjects. Wall labels note the current conservation status in Massachusetts of flowers Lincoln photographed. It comes as no surprise that wild flowers are faring even worse with climate change than humans are.
Noting that status gives an added force to something Lincoln said in 1916: “There is no record so true as the good photographic study; as we see the conditions of plant life eternally changing everywhere, the value of these permanent authentic records to future generations cannot be overestimated.”
“Permanent authentic records”: Unless a photograph is tied to an event, it’s rarely thought of as documentation. Such documentation can be personal: a wedding, a graduation. It can be public: a political speech, a military battle. But botanical? As practiced by Lincoln, definitely so.
Documentation was what Lincoln was very consciously doing. That made his work even more of a challenge than a botanical illustrator’s. An illustrator can create a generic view, taking details from however many specific examples might be useful. The innate specificity of photography meant that Lincoln could use just one example; and that example, being both real and unique, couldn’t be altered to create something idealized or generic.
Lincoln once described himself as “a pretty good photographer but a poor botanist.” A layman can’t judge Lincoln’s botanical abilities, but anyone looking at these images can see how modest he was being about his artistry.
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Also at the Athenaeum is a small show that quite winningly complements the Hale exhibition. “A Living Archive” consists of eight photographic images of botanical subjects by Lindsey Beal and May Babcock.
The unusualness of those images makes “photographic images” a more appropriate term, perhaps, than “photographs. “Archive” consists of one digital print and several anthotypes and plantistypes. What, you may well ask, might those be? Anthotype is a format dating back to the early days of photography. Plantistype was invented by Babcock and Beal. Both involve using natural pigments and exposing subjects to light, no camera necessary. With plantistypes, the photographers also use special paper they have made.
In appearance, these anthotypes and plantistypes could be distant kin to Color Field paintings: delicate, beguiling, slightly otherworldly. That otherworldliness is paradoxical, though, since the materials employed in their making make them more naturally of this world than any “regular” photograph. Lincoln aimed for documentation. So do Beal and Babcock, hence the title “A Living Archive.” They also achieve something else, something far rarer: documentation that doubles as emanation.
WILD FLOWERS OF NEW ENGLAND
A LIVING ARCHIVE
At Boston Athenaeum, 10½ Beacon St., through Sept. 5. 617-227-0270, bostonathenaeum.org
Mark Feeney can be reached at [email protected].