Riffing on still life paintings and Dulwich Picture Gallery’s position amid lovely gardens, Unearthed is the first major exhibition dedicated to photography in the gallery’s history. Dulwich’s exhibition spaces are small yet lend themselves to short or partial histories: here, a journey through plants and botany in photography.

 

For photographic pioneers, the advantage of still lifes lay in the genre’s very name: with long exposures essential in those early years, immobile subjects allowed for crisper images. William Henry Fox Talbot’s 1840s photo of dahlias using his silver salts technique now seems modest, yet at the time would have been revelatory. In contrast, another early photographic form, the cyanotype, a photogram in a delicious deep blue represented here in Anna Atkins’s images of algae, seems as fresh now as when it emerged in the middle of the 19th century. Atkins is an established great but Cecilia Glaister, her contemporary, was only recently discovered — she used Fox Talbot’s photogenic drawing technique to create marvellously graphic images of then-fashionable ferns in the 1850s.

 

Another photographer who came to light posthumously is Charles Jones, a gardener who created a body of images of flowers and vegetables — immaculately composed, beautifully printed. Here, Jones’s images ricochet off close-ups of plants and veg by modernist photographic greats like Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham. They all captured the symbolic potential and the bodily power of plants — similar conclusions, despite diverse intentions — and lead inexorably to the eroticism of Robert Mapplethorpe’s tulips and orchids. Another unintentional master was Karl Blossfeldt, whose loving zooms into unloved weeds were intended for study rather than as art, revealing the decorative beauty in humdrum nature.