Rephotography: an ecologist’s archive; habitat destruction; natural regeneration and rewilding

Summary

In 2011 the Natural History Museum London commissioned me to make new work inspired by a collection of anonymous glass negatives depicting the British landscape, from the beginning of the 20th century. After extensive research, a name scratched on a glass plate revealed the identity of the photographer, the famous British botanist and ecologist Sir Edward James Salisbury (1886–1978). E.J. Salisbury journeyed through Great Britain with a notebook, a vasculum and a camera, meticulously documenting landscape and its flora with utmost precision. In these photographs, the endless pine forests, the ‘wandering dunes’ of Scotland and Norfolk appear rugged and empty, just as one might imagine these places to be, though in actual fact, nature in these places is under active management of public and private conservation and environmental organizations. Walking, searching, GPS in hand, I attempted to find the exact locations where Salisbury stood when he took his photographs at the beginning of the 20th century. I was not so much concerned with a literal comparison between the landscape as it was then and as it is now, but more with defining my own role and vision as an artist alongside that of the scientist Salisbury.

Re-visiting combines photographs, texts and moving image work that highlight complex issues in relationships between humans, plants, and environment in Salisbury's time and now.

Visiting the places Sir Edward James Salisbury photographed between 1914 and 1933 in Scotland, Norfolk and Devon, I looked at how the landscape has changed over nearly ninety years. A complex quest as nothing is as simple as it first appears. I gathered evidence from Salisbury's photographic records and his notes, local information, botanical sources and topographic evidence.

Changes in the landscape can be caused by climate, humans and/or animals (for example, a bird might be carrying a seed from A to B, hence a new species might appear in an unfamiliar habitat). Is all this valuable information enough to account for what has happened to these landscapes in the intervening years?