Exhalation/Transmissions, Passages Botaniques

In this new body of work Bos uses analog photographic processes to explore contrasts and echoes between the designed worlds of botanical gardens, biodiversity gardens and the natural environment. The use of low tech photographic technologies prevents this from becoming a strictly documentary project, since these techniques heighten the dreamlike, magical or even chimerical quality of the work, sometimes seeming to make the invisible visible.
In this new body of work Bos uses analog photographic processes to explore contrasts and echoes between the designed worlds of botanical gardens, biodiversity gardens and the natural environment. The use of low tech photographic technologies prevents this from becoming a strictly documentary project, since these techniques heighten the dreamlike, magical or even chimerical quality of the work, sometimes seeming to make the invisible visible.
Plant processes such as exhalation, transmission, photosynthesis, regeneration and decomposition cross boundaries between the human and the non-human, just as plants and gardens negotiate frontiers between the natural and the cultural or artistic. It is timely to investigate how we represent human separation from, and inclusion in, nature. Climate change, biodiversity loss, and now global pandemics are familiar parts of today’s lexicon, highlighting how some aspects of the natural world have already existed within “the anthropocene” for a long time.
In pinhole photography, light passes through a tiny aperture to alter the chemistry of photo paper or film, much as light triggers photosynthesis in plants. Long exposures record a passage of time. By using objects and the photogram technique in the darkroom, I add a poetic dimension to the resulting images, making visible ordinarily invisible transactions such as exhalation, transmission, photosynthesis, and regeneration between the human and natural worlds.
In pinhole photography, light passes through a tiny aperture to alter the chemistry of photo paper or film, much as light triggers photosynthesis in plants. Long exposures record a passage of time. By using objects and the photogram technique in the darkroom, I add a poetic dimension to the resulting images, making visible ordinarily invisible transactions such as exhalation, transmission, photosynthesis, and regeneration between the human and natural worlds.