Upcoming Publication, Van Zoetendaal Publishers, September 2012

With Nurture Studies, Diana Scherer presents an archive of flowers she has grown from seed over a six-month period. Rather than letting the flowers grow in open soil, she has forced each plant to develop within the confines of a vase. Only at the end of the process does she remove the plant’s corset, exposing roots that retain their shape as an evocation of the now absent vase.

There is an inherent contradiction in Scherer’s working method. Although she is dedicated to the project and keeps a close eye on whether the roots are developing as desired—checking them carefully and with the utmost precision—her ability to manipulate the plants’ growth is limited. She has to accept the impossibility of total control. This contrast between almost obsessive monitoring and an inability to fundamentally influence events becomes an intense, almost ritual presence in her work. Scherer’s photos are carefully rationed, showing a single moment as the culmination of a long process of growth. She documents the flowers at their peak, just before they begin to shrivel as the plants start to die.

The photos Scherer has produced for Nurture Studies recall the illustrations in seventeenth-century botanical encyclopaedias, which presented flowers roots and all. Her work also has strong similarities with 1970s plant books, in which indoor plants were often arranged on a pedestal and set off with fabrics that added a romantic touch to the whole. Although clearly referring to these predecessors, Scherer has no difficulty avoiding the perceived cosiness of the “pot plant” genre. Her images are bare, unadorned. The careful observer will notice that most of the plants are anything but perfect specimens. Brown edges and broken stems show that mortality is already making its presence felt. The pink aster’s leaves are already dying off and other plants, dandelion and cow parsley for instance, wouldn’t be deemed worthy of a second glance on the side of the road. Scherer treats them all as equals.

The floral portraits form a pendant to earlier photo series in which Scherer opted for much rawer imagery, things like young girls lying on the ground with their backs to the camera, collapsed like rag dolls, so that viewers almost automatically think of them as victims (Mädchen, 2002–2007). In Nurture Studies this confrontational imagery has made way for subtlety. Although the flowers, with their exposed roots, look just as fragile as the girls, Scherer avoids any semblance of drama, mainly by the objectivity of her photographic style, arranging the plants upright in the frame and photographing them with a technical camera. This approach is consistent with the orderly way collectors catalogue their objects.

Every year they come back. They are all over the city. There is one just outside my frontdoor. They are high. I have measured them. Some are 2,50 meters tall. I counted them in my area. Between the Overtoom and the Mercatorplein there were 38 of them. Pink and red. They are on our pavements from May till September. They are at their prettiest in August when they are in full bloom. At least, as long as it wasn’t too hot in the months before. Although they are supposed to be a species that can bear the heat quite well. The city puts them there to decorate our environment. It works for me. I like them. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find anything about them on the internet. Not even a picture. I watch them. I have done so for a few years now. They are really attractive to me. But every year I also wonder if the other inhabitants of the city are aware of them. I never see anybody else looking at them. And what are they called? When I told my friends that I was planning to photograph them, they didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. They had never seen a single geraniumhill in Amsterdam before.

Geraniumhill, geraniumblob, geraniumthing …