With an endless variety of species, transformations, and life cycles, the plant world has been an inexhaustible source of inspiration for photographers since the earliest days of the discipline. Works such as Karl Blossfeldt’s botanical close-ups, produced at the end of the 19th century, have become benchmarks for artists. This autumn, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) hosts the group exhibition ‘Science/Fiction – A Non-History of Plants’, bringing together images by over 40 artists, from the beginnings of photography to the present day. The works on show demonstrate the range of approaches taken by photographers – often fueled by technological developments – to unravel the mysteries of the plant kingdom, from video and cyanotype to collage and ceramics. Here are five artists not to be missed during your visit.

Elspeth Diederix

While most photographers confine themselves to the role of attentive observers, Elspeth Diederix makes her own garden the object of her visual practice. Passionate about flora, the horticultural artist created ‘The Miracle Garden’ in Amsterdam in 2018, where she cultivates numerous flowers and plants in a public space maintained by local residents. Diederix captures this open-air cabinet of curiosities in a series of close-up shots that reveal the curves, folds, and reliefs of the plants, as well as their vibrant colors, giving her subject matter an intimate, even sensual light. Under her lens, Campanula bells resemble mouths sticking out their tongues, and the stems protruding from Allium and Kniphofia bulbs shoot out in all directions like fireworks.

Gohar Dashti

As the pandemic reminded people all over the world, when humans leave a place to its own devices, nature reclaims it – and more quickly than you might think. This is evident in Gohar Dashti’s photographs, in which poppy fields, beds of moss, and clusters of fir trees, invade abandoned buildings and seem to proliferate. At once reassuring and threatening, these shots capture swathes of plants in the foreground, eclipsing the outdated architecture to suggest the triumph of the natural world. Like much of the Iranian photographer’s work, this project recounts the traces left by the passage of time and the destructive power of mankind – particularly the Iran-Iraq war – which nature always seems to survive.

Almudena Romero

Can plants speak? Can plants be artists? These are the questions that Spanish artist Almudena Romero has been addressing for years, countering the idea of human domination of nature. By creating the Museum of Plant Art, a virtual museum featuring a wide variety of images, Almudena Romero celebrates the plant world’s capacity for agency and creation, such as the variations in  color and texture linked to the natural phenomena of photobleaching and photosynthesis. Using both ancient and contemporary techniques, her images plunge the viewer into a mise en abyme where plants seem to come alive.

Miljohn Ruperto and Ulrik Heltoft

The earth is still teeming with unidentified plant varieties. The Voynich manuscript, a 15th-century illustrated work full of cryptic drawings, bears witness to the age-old fascination with this part of the unknown. This historic book contains illustrations of dozens of plant species whose existence has never been proven, inspiring photographers Miljohn Ruperto and Ulrik Heltoft to bring them to life. By digitally assembling fragments of existing plants and modeling them in 3D, they created hybrid flowers and grasses, some parts of which are recognizable by the familiar shape of a bulb, root, or petal. Photographed in black and white against a dark background, these ultra-credible, if totally imaginary, plants make a mockery of the authority of botanical knowledge and its classical modes of representation. At the MEP, the series resonates with Joan Fontcuberta’s project presented in the same room: a larger than life herbarium, composed entirely of fanciful species created from scratch.