Alan Klotz Gallery 740 West End Avenue, Suite 52 NY 10025 New York États-Unis
The gallery has unearthed and assembled for exhibition a rare, large collection of vintage platinum prints by Edwin Hale Lincoln (1848 - 1938), from his famed series "Wildflowers of New England". This work, in the collections of only a few museums, (There are only 2 complete sets, one at the New York Public Library and the other at the Lenox Library Association), and only showing up on the market in small groups, can now be viewed here as a large coherent body of work, in all its variety.
For 20 years at his home in and around Lenox Massachusetts, Edwin Hale Lincoln, naturalist, photographer and jack-of-all-trades, painstakingly recorded
the wildflowers of his native New England on 8 x 10 inch glass plates. 400 Platinum photographic prints make up the eight volumes of Lincoln's magnum opus, published starting in 1914.
His intention was to record and help preserve the delicate flora native to the region which was threatened by development and ignorance. Gustav Stickley, in a supportive statement printed in The Craftsman in 1915 said,
The wild flowers of New England are one of our most precious inspirational inheritances, yet we have driven them to the fence corners with our plows, dried up with our factories the ponds and meadows they once fledged; carelessly uprooted myriads of them to gratify a momentary whim for possession. Now that their delicate beauty is in danger of vanishing completely from our land we are awakening to an appreciation of how barren and bleak the world would be without their rifts of color and wandering breaths of perfume.
Lincoln accomplished his memorable floral catalogue by exploring woods, meadows and creek banks in search of prime wildflower specimens. He would dig them up, protecting the roots in damp moss, take them home and revivify them in a cool corner of his cellar, then bring them up to have their portraits "made" in his drawing room/studio. Once the images were secured on his glass plate negatives, he would carefully take the plant back to where he found it and replant it. This elaborate procedure gives you an idea of the value that Lincoln placed on his subjects.
The prints that make up Wildflowers of New England were created at a time when photography as a medium was seriously trying to sort out its scientific attributes from its artistic aspirations. Lincoln's prints walk a line between the two but actually, happily, often cross and re-cross the now meaningless boundary. The prints are at once a prime isolated record, clearly seen, and then a minimalist construct, reduced and shown free of clutter and excessive, albeit natural, context. Or as Lincoln scholar Georges Dimock succinctly described them, the prints are "poised between subjective interpretation and impartial documentation."