A cohort of trees, photographs, scientists, an artist and a curator: the collaborative study of environmental change

I explore how a historic image archive can be re-worked through
collaborative artistic-scientific practice, and how photography can
be ‘re-performed’ as a strategy to observe an environmental
change. The focus is on a project by the photographer Chrystel
Lebas, who between 2011 and 2017 worked in collaboration with
botanists from the Natural History Museum, London. The
collaborators used historic and contemporary photographs for
seasonal observations in the field. Their specific interest was in
the potential for using historic visual ecological records to
investigate environmental change as observed now.
The paper explores the hybridization of technical, aesthetic and
embodied knowledge, the application of montage and the tacit
creation of a visual framework for observation. It draws attention
to the potential inflexibility in interpretation inherent in the
accepted systematic practice of placing ecological records within
a herbarium in a natural history collection. Secondly, it illustrates
the neglected potential of photographic collections within
scientific research