Regarding Nature

Regarding Nature will be the first time that the unique, monumental landscape photographs of French landscape photographer Chrystel Lebas are shown in the Netherlands. Lebas garnered international acclaim through her panoramic photographs, created at twilight. This project shows her most recent, and what is perhaps her most ambitious, project to date. In 2011 the Natural History Museum in London asked Chrystel Lebas to create new works based on an intriguing collection of anonymous glass negatives of the British landscape at the beginning of the twentieth century. The project, which was completed this year, did not only produce a number of new works, but also the name of the photographer: the glass plates had apparently been made by the famous British botanist and ecologist Sir Edward James Salisbury (1886–1978). In the exhibition, Lebas’ photographs and films are combined with original glass plates, unique herbarium pages and personal documents from the collections of the Natural History Museum and the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, of which Salisbury had been the director. The combination provides a complex image of an apparently unspoilt landscape that is strongly impacted by ecological change.

In the footsteps of Sir Edward James Salisbury, Lebas spent the past four years travelling through Scotland and Norfolk, with a short stay in Devon. At the beginning of the 20th century, Salisbury travelled through Great Britain armed with a notebook, a vasculum and a camera, recording the landscape and its flora with utmost precision on fragile glass plates that, until recently, led a hidden and anonymous existence in the Natural History Museum. On these photographs, as well as those made by Chrystel Lebas 90 years later, the infinite pine forests and ‘wandering dunes’ of Scotland and Norfolk appear rugged and empty: precisely as they would be imagined by the unknowing, romantic soul. In reality, these places are nature reserves strictly protected by public and private nature and environmental organisations. Scouring the landscape, guided by her GPS, Lebas has tried to locate the exact spots where Salisbury stood when he made his photographs. To her, the literal comparison of the landscape as it was then and is as it is today was not as important as the opportunity to re-examine her own role and vision as an artist in light of Salisbury’s role as a scientist.

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• https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/j...
• https://seeallthis.com/post-magazine/no-...
• http://www.chrystellebas.com/articles/Ch...
• http://www.chrystellebas.com/articles/so...