Botanical imagery has a history of being a female medium. It was originally one of the most accepted ways for women to emerge into science in the 1800s. Similarly, the first female photographer, Anna Atkins, emerged into photography through botanical representations in her cyanotypes. The parallels of women entering two different, but similar, fields through botanical imagery are uncanny. Historically speaking, women have been associated with having strong connections to the natural world. Through looking at botanical imagery with an ecofeminist perspective as well as the historical and cultural trends of women being associated with nature, we can observe these similarities of how women made their debut in science and photography through botanical imagery.

The topic of photography as an art or a science is one that dates to the beginning of the field of photography. In 1852, the first photography exhibition, the Royal Society of the Arts, was held in London where Roger Fenton spoke on the question of whether photography could be considered an art in his essay On the situation and the future prospects of the art of photography. Prior to this exhibition, photographs had been displayed alongside scientific studies of the time. Having an independent photography exhibition paved the way for a new type of photography that was not viewed as a scientific tool but rather a form of art. Though early photographers were in part artisans, people still perceived photography as a science or a form of technology rather than an art. This was in part because early photographic processes involved the exactness of mixing chemicals to develop an image created by the camera. In fact, it was this ‘mechanical’ quality of photography that prevented it from being perceived as an art.

“This confusion was caused above all by the lack of any manual intervention in the image, which was thus seen to resemble too closely the way in which the subject represented was usually perceived by the naked eye.”[1]

This concept of the ‘mechanical’ can also be related to the way in which the Scientific Revolution “proceeded to mechanize and to rationalize the world view” and inevitably caused the thought of earth as a female entity that provided for its inhabitants.[2] One of the reasons for trying to rid society of this thought was because, with the technological advances, there was a need to abuse the natural world for resources and seeing the earth as a living female entity caused a question of ethics and would have slowed commercial production. The idea that there is no manual intervention in photography is an outdated thought even by way of 1800s photographic processes. I would venture to argue that it has even become less of a manual medium in today’s sense without the need for hand-developing film and prints or even the manual act of loading film into the camera. In reviewing Clara Sipprell’s photographic work, work that will later be discussed, Leila Mechlin describes it as “not only photography but art, and art of a very unusual type.”[3] Mechlin also argues that despite the sizable number of kodaks sold each year and of the hundreds of thousands of pictures snapped, only a few have “artistic merit.” In looking at examples of photography that have been historically deemed as “scientific” photography or a tool in scientific documentation, the line between photography as art or science documentation has blurred more than ever.

[1] Zanot, “Exhibition of Recent Specimens of Photography.” Photography: The Origins 1839-1890. 34-66.

[2] Merchant, “Nature as Female.” The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution.

[3] Mechlin, “Clara E. Sipprell, Pictorial Photographer: A Note on Her Work.” 599–604.

 In looking at botanical photography, there is not a better combination of photography as an art and science than the flora and fauna specimens of Mary Schaeffer Warren from the Canadian Rockies. A late 1800s and early 1900s photographer, she developed an interest in botany after she married Dr. Charles Schaeffer and started to help him catalog flora and fauna in the Canadian Rockies.[1] She later went on to finish and publish Old Indian Trails of the Canadian Rockies, in 1911 after her husband passed away. Prior to meeting Dr. Charles Schaeffer, she studied botanical illustration with well-known floral painter, George Cochran Lambdin.

Due to her artistic background, Mary Schaeffer Warren developed a unique way of combining traditional and new forms of botanical imagery by hand painting her black and white photographs to reflect the flora and fauna’s natural color (Figure 1). Even though photography had been established as a medium since 1839 when the daguerreotype and the negative-positive processes were created, she still managed to create a new hybrid medium of botanical imagery. In doing this, she not only accurately conveys the likeness of the plants, but she combines three mediums that, throughout history, tried to keep women from participating in them: art, botany, and photography.

[1] Sandler, “Against the Odds Women Pioneers in the First Hundred Years of Photography.”

Before looking at botanical illustration as a feminine genre, it is important to understand why nature and landscape are described as feminine entities. The context of nature as a feminine entity is in no way a new concept. A plentiful number of ancient civilizations had equivalents to a female being or deity that related to fertility or nature. A modern adaptation of this would be in the form of Mother Nature as a female figure responsible for natural phenomena such as the changing of the seasons. The Greeks’ version of this can be seen in their depictions of the Earth goddess, Gaia. She is credited with aiding in the creation of the gods and the nature that supports human life.

Through art history, Gaia is usually depicted with a note of fertility or connection to the Earth. Interestingly, Gaia is also known to have the ability to reproduce asexually which allows her better control over her offspring rather than when reproducing sexually. When being visually depicted, Gaia is most often shown from the waist up to represent her body emerging from the Earth as an embodiment of all its living things: animals, humans, and plants. One example of this can be seen in Gaia’s depiction on the Pergamon Altar (Figure 2). In this scene, Gaia urges Athena to spare her son, Alkyoneus, who was leading the giants in a battle against the Greek gods.

On another note, in Ecological Feminism, Warren discusses Biehl’s claim that it is irrational to believe that supernatural entities such as Gaia will play a role in ending the domination of both women and nature. Biehl’s logic behind this is that domination is a human construction and, therefore, it must be changed through human action.[1] What Biehl fails to mention is that the creation of supernatural entities are also human constructions in a sense. Supernatural entities such as Gaia or Mother Nature vary between cultures in such that they evoke the beliefs and values of that culture which also include different forms of patriarchy and

[1] Warren, Karen J. Ecological Feminism. London: Routledge, 1994: 1-195.

gender roles. In summary, even though supernatural entities cannot resolve issues of domination, they can aid in understanding the history of gender roles and how a given culture would have viewed women.          

A commonality amongst many early well-known women photographers is that a lot of them started their careers by working alongside their husband, father, brother, cousin, or another male (like how women were able to participate in early science) photographer as their assistant. Early women photographers photographed many genres of photography, but two popular genres in the 19th and 20th centuries were landscape and nature photography.

Clara Sipprell was a Canadian photographer in the mid to late 1900’s who started in photography due to her brother opening a photography studio and hiring her as an assistant. She later started creating her own work by learning photography techniques from her brother. While Sipprell’s work varied in subject, one of her well-known subjects included landscapes. A style can be noticed when viewing photographs from Sipprell’s portfolio that is coherent with the style of the Pictorialist movement. The movement started in the late 1800s and continued into the 1900s. Pictorialism can be described as a style of photography that emphasizes the beauty of the subject through the means of a dreamlike photo aesthetic. Blurry and sometimes out-of-focus images are a Pictorialist style. It is for this very Pictorialist nature that Mechlin lists Clara Sipprell as an artist. She relates the act of the photographer considering the mise-en-scene of a photograph, such as composition, lighting, and rhythm, as an artistic choice that the photographer must make to ensure the success of the photograph. Pictorialism was primarily developed as a reaction to a photograph being documentation rather than an art. By clearly ignoring rules that would make a photograph a useful source of documentation, such as the lack of focus, Pictorialists were able to escape the confines of what society expected a photograph to be. Through Pictorialism, Sipprell created a picturesque representation of a landscape that showed the beauty of nature and was viewed as a piece of art rather than a documentation of a landscape.

Throughout time, there have been notable art historical works that show a connection to women and the natural landscape. In Power, Privilege, and Landscape in Minoan Art, Chapin brings about the idea that some Minoan frescos that show landscapes with flowers and plants have Minoan religious connotations.[1] To go back to the idea of female deities being connected to nature, Chapin says,

“the crocuses and lilies that are found in the fresco also appear consistently in Aegean art as offerings and as decoration for altars and offering tables, while elsewhere monkeys and doves appear in connection with a goddess of nature.”[2]

The inclusion of icons in Minoan and Aegean religion shows the importance of the depiction of the landscape in Minoan society. The importance here also extends to the natural world and the balance of the changing of the seasons by a female goddess. One example Chapin discusses is the LM I fresco from room 14 at the Royal Villa at Ayia Triada. This fresco shows women within a vibrant landscape of lilies and other flowering plants and wild animals such as felines stalking birds. It is thought that these fresco panels were meant to be a shrine. In looking at the imagery further, there is a sense of movement of the standing woman that matches the movement of the plants and felines (Figure 3). This motion could be interpreted at a ritual dance adding to the idea that these frescos were in a shrine devoted to a goddess of nature. The inclusion of animals such as the birds and felines have other religious symbols, but also give a visual of a basic food chain where the birds are pecking at the plants and the felines prepare to pounce conveying that the nature goddess is responsible for all forms of life.

[1] Chapin, Anne P. “Power, Privilege, and Landscape in Minoan Art.” Hesperia Supplements, vol. 33 (2004): 47-64. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1354062.

[2] Ibid.

Another well-known female photographer that started as an assistant that printed Edward Curtis’ negatives was Imogen Cunningham. Cunningham was producing photographic work from 1906 to 1977. After working with Curtis, she received a scholarship to study chemistry as it applies to photography. Once she had a popular and successful studio of her own, she began to become overwhelmed as a mother and a popular portrait photographer which led her to making photographs of plants in her free time.[1] Far different from the Pictorialist landscapes of Clara Sipprell and Cunningham’s own experimenting with Pictorialist portraiture, she photographed plants using straight photography.  Straight photography includes techniques such as photographing the subject in a way that shows it as it is as well as little to no alterations the image in post processing. Judith Fryer Davidov describes Cunningham’s The Wood Beyond the World, The Wind, The Vision, Sun and Wind, The Voice of the Wood (Figure 4) photographs as a series of “symbolic ‘woman=nature’ images.”[2] These photographs show women draped in cloth in nature settings. Each of these images utilize Cunningham’s Pictorialist portraiture style that creates a dreamlike representation of women’s connection to nature. Davidov goes on to say that the photographs in this series,

“play with contrasts between stability and movement: a sturdy, rooted earth goddess becomes a zephyr, a symbol of wind moving across the land, as she lifts the upper part of her body draped with filmy, billowing scarves; emerging from the rocks and trees, other veiled and ethereal women sway in dreamy dances.”[3]

[1] Sandler, “Against the Odds Women Pioneers in the First Hundred Years of Photography.”

[2] Davidov, “Women’s Camera Work.” 295-375.

[3] Ibid.

The connection Davidov makes to the women emerging from the earth like an earth goddess is similar in the depictions of Gaia previously discussed and helps in conveying this historical connection that women have to nature.

Some people attribute Imogen Cunningham’s botanical photography to be reminiscent of paintings by Georgia O’Keefe. This is an important connection because of how Georgia O’Keefe had a reputation for starting feminist conversations through her botanical paintings. The similarities between O’Keefe’s abstracted botanical illustrations show parallels to Pictorialism in how they allow the viewer to look at the beauty and detail of the subject’s representation rather than looking at it for what it is. These conversations were still ahead of their time. Like Cunningham in the field of photography, O’Keefe was creating botanical paintings in a time when fine art was a male dominated field.

            One of the most well-known female photographers and botanical photographers in history was Anna Atkins. Though Atkins is credited as the first female photographer, photography pioneer, Henry Fox Talbot’s wife, Constance Talbot, worked with Atkins on cyanotypes because of the friendship between their families. Atkins had a background in drawing and notably drew illustrations of shells for her father’s translation of Lamarck’s Genera of Shells. Soon after, she realized her interest in botany and began pursuing botanical photography. In 1842, the cyanotype was accidentally created by Sir John Herschel when he was trying to find a way to print photographs in color.[1] Cyanotypes are created using ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide to create images that resemble x-rays but in a cyan blue color. By placing algae directly onto her photosensitive paper, she was able to expose the paper to reveal direct outlines of the algae (Figure 6). Interestingly, she was taught the cyanotype process directly from Herschel himself, but like Schaeffer, Atkins received no formal education in botany.[2] She nonetheless continued to produce work while learning about the natural sciences. In 1843, she produced the first book made up work entirely created by a photographic process: Photographs of British Algae. The images, as well as pages such as the title page, in her book were made through her staple medium, cyanotypes (Figure 5). Atkins’ choice to use cyanotypes over her background in lithography shows that she did not necessarily choose the medium to speak for itself, but for the functionality that it provided in reproducing images quickly and accurately.[3]

[1] Saska, “Anna Atkins: Photographs of British Algae.” 8–15.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

Though her algae studies are well known today, she never intended for them to become so famous. Her desire was to simply be a part of the “exchanging of ideas”[1] The seriousness in the value of her work was discredited by the 1840s Victorian era society and

“as a nonprofessional, upper-middle-class woman, Atkins was bound by cultural conventions of the Victorian era; her father acted as a mediator between the public and the private spheres giving her the means to make an entrée into the public realm.”[2]

These cyanotypes show Atkins’ combined interests in photography, botanical illustration, and the natural sciences.

[1] Ibid.

[2] Saska, “Anna Atkins: Photographs of British Algae.” 8–15.

The field of botany has a history of being a feminine field. It is a common belief that women did not participate in the sciences at one point, but the fact is that they just did not publicly participate.  Much like Ann B. Shteir in her essay Gender and “Modern” Botany in Victorian England, I press the importance in looking at the relationship between women and gender in science, and to go a step further, the importance in society specific gender roles.

            When looking for early women scientists, we must look in ‘unconventional’ places before we can start to see their contributions to the early sciences. Women who practiced science in the 1900s would typically do so from the confines of their home. Women were denied the right to study and conduct research in universities and therefore had to makeshift their own laboratories, apothecary stores, and dissecting rooms within domestic spaces such as their dining room tables.[1] In a critique on Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, Watts states Carolyn Merchant argued that instead of viewing the 1600s as a time of scientific progress, she blamed Francis Bacon for the concept that

“nature (always conceived as feminine) was to be dominated, mastered, ‘vexed,’ penetrated, and exploited and arguing that this view led to the devaluing of earth, of scientific knowledge produced by women, and of women themselves.”[2]

Two ways women were able to get their research out into the public eye was by taking a pseudonym or by using their husband’s name.

[1] Gelbart, “Adjusting the Lens: Locating Early Modern Women of Science.” 116-127. 

[2] Gelbart, “Adjusting the Lens: Locating Early Modern Women of Science.” 116-127. 

The concept that nature is feminine, and that nature is dominated by humans directly relates to ecological feminism. One of the main takeaways in ecological feminism studies is the idea of human domination over non-human nature. It is from this that the connection forms between women studies and ecology. The like term between the two being “male-domination” over non-human nature and women. It is not an uncommon thought that humans are superior to any living that that is not human. Likewise, it is not uncommon for people to see men as the dominant sex. The domination of women by men has been documented throughout history in many different cultures. In Warren’s argument, she claims that women are identified with nature and physicality while men are seen to relate more to the human and mentality.[1] This can return to the idea that women are more connected with the physical world and the natural world due to their reproductive nature. In The Death of Nature, Merchant explores the human destruction of nature with an emphasis on the personification of the earth as a bountiful, female figure. Merchant compares the earth’s creation of precious metals to a child in the womb and then discusses the role that miners play in the destruction of this natural birth.[2] Warren quotes Ariel Salleh in saying that women’s menstruation, ‘the tiring symbiosis of pregnancy, the range of childbirth and the pleasure of suckling an infant, these things already ground women’s consciousness in the knowledge of being coterminous with nature.’[3] This ‘grounding’ helps to relate the reason as to why women are seen to be identified with the physical and natural world.

[1] Warren, “Ecological Feminism.” 1-195.

[2] Merchant, “Nature as Female.” The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution.

[3] Warren, “Ecological Feminism.” 1-195.

In 19th century England, there was a push for reevaluating botany and restructuring it into a male-dominated field. The goal in this restructuring was to ‘defeminize’ botany.[1] Prior to the defeminization of botany in the 1800s, it was the most widely accepted gateway for women to enter the sciences. In Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England, 1760-1860, Shteir says that women were encouraged to study plants and flowers because it was perceived to be

“aesthetically concordant with feminine beauty, or elegance, or delicacy’ and as a pedagogical tool that created a ‘path to piety and health or as an antidote to superficial accomplishments.”[2]

 This could be in part because of the historical connotations of herbalism and the use of plants in medicinal forms as being a female domain.

            Saska discusses the issue of how men that were considered armatures in each medium would often pursue their medium or topic in the eyes of society while women amateurs were expected to experiment within the confines of the home. She states that

“skill in drawing, painting, and needlework were seen as marks of the accomplished woman . . .”[3]

With the fine arts being a pass time that many women were expected to take part in paired with the phenomenon that plants and flowers were an embodiment of feminine beauty, it seems only natural that many women would pursue botanical illustrations or even botanical photography.

[1] Shteir, “Gender and ‘Modern’ Botany in Victorian England.”

[2] Shteir, Ann B. “Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora's Daughters and Botany in England, 1760-1860.”

[3] Saska, “Anna Atkins: Photographs of British Algae.” 8–15.

In her essay, Shteir discusses the turning point of botany as a feminine science in the form of Sarah Waring’s A Sketch of the Life of Linnaeus which is a biography that embodies societal views on the gendered nature of botany at that time. In the narrative, a 15-year-old boy aspires to break into the medical field and is encouraged by his father to learn about plants from his sister who lives at home. This represents the shift in women handing the field over to men by teaching them what they know. Women were also seen as teachers of botany to their children rather than botanists themselves.

            The field of botany changed drastically upon the death of the founder of the Linnean Society, Sir James Edward Smith. Soon after his death, Lindley rose as a professor in botany in the new London University where he set out to move botany away from the identification and classification methods of the Linnean Society and into a direction with a focus on plant structure.[1] Shteir quotes Lindley in his inaugural lecture in saying,

“‘It has been very much the fashion of late years, in this country, to undervalue the importance of this science, and to consider it an amusement for ladies rather than an occupation for the serious thoughts of man.’”[2]

This quote from Lindley goes to show the shift in gender connotations of botany as a nonserious, form of entertainment for domestic women to a serious science for men. Even though women were excluded from most aspects of botany by the work of John Lindley, he made sure that they were still able to understand current breakthroughs in his Ladies’ Botany: or, A Familiar Introduction to the Study of the Natural System in Botany (1834-1837).[3] In the preface, he denotes that the reading is for the ‘unscientific reader’ and that even though some people struggle to, but think that they understand it, they are far from truly understanding it on a level to do the field of study justice.[4] Books intended for ‘unscientific’ readers were a way to put women into a different category of botany from the serious studies of the male scientist and therefore adding to the simplified, entertainment purposes of botany for women.

[1] Shteir, Ann B. “Gender and “Modern” Botany in Victorian England.” Osiris, vol. 12 (1997)

[2] Ibid.

[3] Shteir, “Gender and ‘Modern’ Botany in Victorian England.”

[4] Lindley, John. “PREFACE.” Introduction. In Ladies' Botany: Or, a Familiar Introduction to the Study of the Natural System of Botany, 1:iii-xiv.

In conclusion, there are many parallels to the history of women beginning their careers in art, botany, and photography. One of the largest connections is the use of botany and botanical illustration as a vehicle for women to enter a male dominated field. In looking at historical documents of the women-nature connection,

it becomes clear that the societal acceptance of this women-nature phenomenon is the reason for women pursuing botanical studies in a variety of fields. In fact, the belief that plants, flowers, and nature are “aesthetically concordant with feminine beauty,”[1] is largely the reason for women getting their start in science, art, and photography as an art and a science.

[1] Saska, “Anna Atkins: Photographs of British Algae.” 8–15.