Photography and Botany

The representations of naturalism and humanism

Abstract

Since ancient times, humans have used plants for curative purposes, but with the emergenceof scientific expeditions, they have also been reproduced and collected to be marketed. Withtravels to other continents, nature goes from being lived to being conquered.

The idea of the environment as an available resource for human use grew in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries under the Enlightenment project. Western man, with the mission of civilizing and bringing progress to all places on earth, started to domesticate, order and archive nature. Such inventory was carried out through the collection of herbaria and the creation of botanical illustrations. Through them, science established a biased view of what nature was, turning plants and animals into an object of study on which to intervene. Furthermore, it should not be forgotten that the western gaze and the scientific mediation on the habitat of “the others”, opened the way for its possible exploitation, by naming it, studying it and classifying it.