Effigies

David Hartwell is a British artist. He exclusively photographs plants from his garden in Pasadena, California. This self-imposed territory of a quarter of an acre is his frame, his palette.

Effigies is a small subset of the two thousand plus shots Hartwell has taken over the course of the past six years. Whereas anthropomorphism is frowned upon by academics as childish behavior, here it is encouraged. For most people, plants are ubiquitous passive bystanders with a somewhat pleasant predisposition. To the artist, this perceived innate neutrality is fertile ground to test the limits of representation. Plants allow the artist to observe an audience ascribe and project the most fanciful of human traits onto something that has none: pareidolia. While a scientist may strive to limit subjective in(ter)ferences in their research, the artist will always be part of the creative process and the final result. Hartwell peers down at and exposes a plant’s most private parts. He reinterprets their life stories for an audience that was never anticipated—humans and animals of a certain size are rarely the intended spectators of the striptease. It is the artist, as choreographer, who magnifies our gaze of those shameless exhibitionists.

Hartwell’s creations are constructions of hundreds of images taken at minute distance intervals, resulting in final pieces of incredible resolution and hundreds of times larger than their original subjects. The images lie at the confluence of the scientific image, traditional botanical illustration, and contemporary representation. Unmistakably vegetal in origin, yet still foreign and perplexing to the uninitiated.