Polypodium Novae Zealandiae, Pirongia. From the album: New Zealand ferns. 148 varieties

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

While intended as scientific images, Herbert Dobbie’s cyanotype photographs of fern specimens are a stunning example of the art of cameraless photography. They are made by laying a plant specimen onto paper sensitised with photographic chemicals and then developed out in the sunlight. The resulting image leaves a white space where the specimen lay, emanating light from a blue picture plane.
The cyanotype process used by Dobbie was pioneered by the English scientist and mathmetician Sir John Herschel in the early 1840s and adapted for use in book form by Anna Atkins, who in 1843 handprinted and published a unique bound volume of cyanotypes, Photographs of British algae: Cyanotype impressions. Atkins’ innovation proved the worth of photography as a process for scientific documentation.

Several decades later, Dobbie used the same process to create a visual description of fern types. Inspired by the Victorian practice — particularly popular in New Zealand — of collecting ferns and pressing them into albums, his albums are a form of botanical enterprise. The variety of New Zealand ferns was celebrated as a special natural feature of the new colony. Newspaper reports from visitors often commented on the large number of ferns growing in the New Zealand bush. Ships such as the SS Tarawera, travelling between Bluff and Australian ports, made scenic stopovers in Fiordland for short day trips. The Tarawera’s promenade deck would be decorated for an evening dance with locally collected ferns, enhanced by the modern charm of electric lights.

Dobbie clearly enjoyed his excursions into the bush, where he collected his own specimens. In the photographs he recorded the name of the fern and its location. However, the process had limited scientific application, as the detail of leaf venation (vein arrangement) could not be recorded. Dobbie’s photographs, arranged and serialised into book form, were sold to a market eager for information about the specimens they saw in the bush. They represent the culmination of a passion for ‘collecting and displaying ferns, a fashion driven in part by nostalgia for a pre-modern style of life and in part by incipient nationalism’,1 the latter seen most clearly in the elevation of the silver fern as a New Zealand icon.

Lissa Mitchell

1 Geoffrey Batchen, Emanations: The art of the cameraless photograph, DelMonico Books, Prestel, Munich, and the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, 2015, p. 14.