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Nature's Beloved Son -- Rediscovering John Muir's Botanical Legacy
By Robert A. Schaefer, Jr. | Wisdom and Inspiration |
Nov 15, 2008
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Images of John Muir’s botanicals are © Stephen J. Joseph
At a time when people are taking a closer look at the environment with a necessary desire to protect it, the arrival of Nature’s Beloved Son: Rediscovering John Muir’s Botanical Legacy by Bonnie J. Gisel with images by Stephen J. Joseph seems very fitting. This book documents the life of John Muir who grew up first in Scotland and then Wisconsin with a profound love for botany, which paved the way for his becoming one of the world’s greatest environmentalists. He also founded the Sierra Club and became its first president. Constantly exploring new areas and recording plant specimens in the United States as well as Canada, he was the Walt Whitman of the botanical world.
At the same time period in which Muir was collecting botanical specimens in Wisconsin and doing his thousand mile walk from Louisville, Kentucky to the Gulf of Mexico, Karl Blossfeldt was photographing plants as art forms in Germany, and Anna Atkins was printing them with the cyanotype process (discovered by Sir John Hershel in 1842 in England). Lyle Rexer describes Anna Atkins in his book Photography’s Antiquarian Avant-garde—The New Wave in Old Processes, “The first true book of photographs, Anna Atkins’s British Algae; Cyanotype Impressions (begun in 1843), was a botanical catalogue made by placing he specimens of dried see weed on coated sheets of paper and exposing the paper to light, leaving a reverse silhouette impression. Her utilitarian intensions of speed and accuracy subsumed her attraction to the beauty of the process, but the aesthetic allure was real and strong.”
Although cameras and printing processes were available to John Muir, he never used photography to document his work. The specimens of plants and flowers, which he gathered were pressed in a special device he carried specifically for that purpose and then taped to paper on which Muir wrote the information about that specimen. Since he was constantly traveling, John Muir would either send these to various herbariums around the United States or drop them off at specific locations for safekeeping.
In my attempts to find out more about Nature’s Beloved Son, I contacted its author, Bonnie J. Gisel.
Robert Schaefer: Were you interested in environmental issues when you were growing up?
Bonnie Gisel: My family camped in the Adirondack Mountains and Catskill Mountains when I was a girl, my grandmother was a horticulturalist, my father took me fishing and hunting. My sense of well-being is intricately attached to nature and the protection of nature. I was in college, actually my senior year, when Earth Day happened. I am very much the recipient of nature nurturing, wilderness protection, and caring for the Planet.
RS: How did you decide on becoming an environmental historian?
BG: While I was in Divinity School at Harvard, my focus became the study of Christianity, Nature, and Humanity—everything I wrote focused on this theme. I wrote a paper on Earth as Altar. I wrote another on the shopping mall as the Garden of Eden. When I completed my Master of Divinity Degree, I began a Ph.D. at Drew University as a Merit Scholar. My focus was again the study of Religion and Nature, this time within the context of the nineteenth century and in particular became focused on 19th Century America.
RS: What are some of the duties of such a job?
BG: I have become a specialist in the study of John Muir, nearly 20 years to date. My sense of responsibility as an environmental historian is to address issues of how the historic past, our relationship with nature, with the land, with science and culture, influence our present thinking about preservation and conservation, about caring for the Earth, about our relationship to it, to each other and to the natural world.
RS: You are also curator of the Sierra Club’s Le Conte; what are some of the responsibilities this position entails?
BG: I have been the curator for seven years. I oversee all operations of the building. Nearly 90 Sierra Club members volunteer each season to assist with greeting the public; we have over 12,000 visitors each season May 1 through September 30. I am very concerned about environmental literacy and we have distributed over 8,000 nature journals to our visitors—especially children. I tell them, "One piece of paper changed John Muir's life"—actually it was a letter to Jeanne Carr about the Calypso borealis that launched his writing career. So, it was one piece of paper. I think, in order for people to care more about the natural world they need to understand their relationship to it, with it, and in writing their stories about what they do, where they go, how they feel, what they see, they understand that nature is not the backdrop against which their lives are lived but an integral part of who they are. Also, we have about 80 programs at LeConte each season, all free and open to the public. I organize all the programs—creating an interesting schedule that includes programs about global warming/climate change, hiking to Half Dome and the John Muir Trail, and programs for families and children.
RS: When did you first become interested in the work of John Muir?
BG: I became interested in John Muir during my first year in my Ph.D. program at Drew University. I had studied many other naturalists and nature writers, but Muir resonated against my own heart. I completed a comprehensive exam for my Ph.D. on John Muir as a religious figure—sort of unusual, not your typical religious figure in American History. I wrote my dissertation on Jeanne Carr, Muir's friend and mentor.
RS: Why didn't John Muir keep more of his pressed plants and flowers in his own collection? (According to Stephen Joseph, you had to check the herbariums in the US to find samples of the pressed plants and flowers, which John Muir had sent them.
BG: When Muir was in Canada and in Indianapolis, as he was about to leave for the Gulf of Mexico, it would have been a very bad idea to take his herbarium with him. He was about to begin collecting more plants, and the last thing he needed was the plants he had already collected, with him. During his 1000-mile walk, he sent plants to his brother to give to his sister to care for. Again, better to send them home for safekeeping. His early plants from California, are lost, as are, I forgot to say, his plants from his 1,000 mile walk, although, at some point, in 1902, his sister sent them, from his 1,000 mile walk, they have, however, been lost. We have some samples of his plants from a second trip through the south, which are located at the University of the Pacific and found, by accident, when I compared entries, read scribbles, in a book, that matched some plant specimens in a separate section of the collection. His plants, sent to Asa Gray (Sereno Watson) in 1881, following the Cruise of the Corwin to Alaska, remained at Harvard. Plants he previously sent to Gray in the 1870s, mostly were returned to Muir, at his request. And, in 1875, he sent plants to John Redfield, in Philadelphia, requested by Redfield—plants from Yosemite and the High Sierra. So, the short answer is, until he married in 1880, he really had no place to keep his plants.
RS: Why didn't John Muir use photography to document these plants and flowers?
BG: Botanists, by-and-large, do not take photographs, they collect plants. You cannot compare plants with photographs. They are also dissected to determine family, genus, and species. As far as I know, Muir did not use a camera. Though there are some photographs of him, probably shot by his daughter Helen in Arizona, and by friends, that are certainly not professionally taken. When Muir was with the Harriman Alaska Expedition, Edward Curtis was a member of the group. He, at the time, was not the famous ethno photographer he would become as a result of the trip. However, it is clear that Muir understood his role and what he was doing—sometimes, disagreeing with certain shots of the "group."
RS: You edited Kindred and Related Spirits: The Letters of John Muir and
Jeanne C. Carr. Do you foresee additional books on the subject of John Muir in the future?
BG: I am not, at this time, planning on writing about Muir. I am, however, the consultant for a major exhibition, planned to open in March 2010, at the Oakland Museum of California. And, I am the curator for an exhibition on Muir's life as a botanist, which CERA and Heyday Books intend to travel worldwide within the next few years.
RS: Are there other environmentalists about whom you’re planning to write? What direction would those take?
BG: No, I am not planning on writing about other environmentalists, with the exception of, perhaps, myself! My life in Yosemite over the past seven years has been quite remarkable. I have lived there in a canvas 9 x 12 tent, without electricity for about five and a half months each season, from mid-April until the first of October—sometimes, I do not know how I managed to orchestrate Nature's Beloved Son. I have a cell phone but I also have an
office. I am the curator for the Sierra Club's LeConte Memorial Lodge, a 104- year-old field station, built by the Sierra Club in 1903. In my office I have a phone, a computer, DSL, electricity, and a refrigerator and microwave oven. Fires are only permitted from 5 pm until 10 pm. I am very busy as the curator for LML and would not have time to mess with all that cooking and cleaning and therefore, generally eat dinner in one of the Yosemite National Park dining facilities or purchase something at one of the stores. This arrangement is not without its challenges. Bears! And, in 2005 and evacuation as a result of a serious flood that closed the Park for twenty-four hours.
Besides the text on John Muir, Nature’s Beloved Son contains digital images by Stephen J. Joseph of the flowers and plants preserved by John Muir. In addition to his intensive work with the plant and flower specimen images, photographer Joseph also provides readers with images of letters, and envelopes by John Muir as well as some of his sketches. There are even photographs of Muir, some taken by the now famous Edward Curtis. I interviewed Stephen Joseph to find out about his work and his involvement with Nature’s Beloved Son.
Robert Schaefer: You have been a photographer for more than forty years. Did you get into photography with the subject matter of nature in mind? What was the subject matter of your work in the early part of your career?
Stephen Joseph: At age eleven, I began photographing people—not plants—in my hometown of Oneonta, New York (about an hour south of Albany). My father had a darkroom, and I became involved in not only taking photographs but also developing them. Later on in the 1970’s, I got into landscape photography and moved to California in 1973. I attended the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, CA and got my BFA (photography and print-making) in 1976, and my MFA in 1984 (photography, lithography and wood-engraving).
RS: How did you become involved with the John Muir Project?
SJ: In 2003 I worked with Bonnie Gisel on a Yosemite Wildflower Exhibition, which opened to the public in 2004 at the LeConte Memorial Lodge in Yosemite and is still on view there. Later, Bonnie had an idea for a project about John Muir as a botanist, and that went on to become Nature’s Beloved Son. She contacted and visited herbariums around the United States and viewed their collections to find what specimens they had by John Muir. This took a lot of time because these specimens are never organized by the botanist who actually collected them but by the name of the flower or plant. After she found them, it became my job to record them.
RS: What equipment did you use to photograph Muir’s dried flowers and plants?
SJ: At first I tried to photograph them with a digital camera, but the end resolution was not good enough. Then I used an Epson Flatbed Scanner 2450 (and later 4870) to produce huge files, which I then had to edit in Adobe Photoshop. Unfortunately, the dried flower and plant specimens were in really bad condition, and I had to recreate a lot missing parts using Photoshop. Although I took a lot of artistic license with my work in this area, I feel that John Muir would approve of the end result.
RS: Does your other photographic work involve botanicals?
SJ: Not botanicals per se. For the last 25 years I have taken panoramic shots of Mount Diablo in Contra Costa County, California, and this will be the subject of my next book. Also, I work with various land trusts in the Bay Area. One of several projects I do all over the county for the Sonoma Land Trust helps to raise money for the Jenner Headlands, a costal ranch of Sonoma County, which the Sonoma Land Trust would like to purchase in order to preserve it.
RS: Are you interested in photographing the specimens of other botanists or environmentalists?
SJ: At this time my other photography projects are headed in other directions.
RS: What does the future hold for your photography?
SJ: Besides the promotion of Nature’s Beloved Son, there are a number of exhibitions scheduled of the large-scale images of John Muir’s plant and flower specimens. One such exhibition will open at the Oakland Museum of California in 2010, and currently the Muir Botanicals are on permanent display at Cavallo Point located at Fort Baker in Marin County, CA. I am also the Centennial Photographer for Muir Woods National Monument for 2008, and a book is scheduled to be published by the Golden Gate National Park Conservancy. Outside the Muir Project, my panoramic book on Mt. Diablo in Contra Costa County, CA will be published by the Mount Diablo Interpretive Association in 2010.
My projects, which do not include Nature are my “Oneonta Series,” which was in July 2008 on the State University Campus at Oneonta, New York. It is comprised of 360º views of Oneonta where I grew up. I also began another series in Oneonta where I photographed a set designer Marjorie Bradley Kellogg who moved her studio there from New York City. Thus, I have embarked on a series of New York City set designers. Yet another series is the studios of other artists in the Bay Area. One of these is Ron Partridge, a ninety-five-year old photographer who is the twin son of photographer Imogene Cunningham.
RS: Congratulations; that is quite a list of projects. In closing, I would like to add that Nature’s Beloved Son is a work of art in book form of which its publisher Heyday Books can be proud. Its green cloth cover with an inlay of one of Muir’s botanicals is an immediate indication of the quality of information awaiting readers on the inside pages. Bonnie J. Gisel’s text along with your images of Muir’s flower and plant specimens provide a wealth of information on John Muir as well as a feast for the eyes. Hopefully, it will provide inspiration and interest in the study and preservation of the exquisite flora existing all across the United States of America.
Bonnie J. Gisel can be contacted at: bjgisel@yahoo.com
Stephen J. Josephs can be contacted at: sjjoseph@comcast.net
For more information about the John Muir botanical prints by Stephen Josephs contact:
http://www.johnmuirsbotany
More of Stephen Joseph’s images can be viewed at:
http://www.stephenjosephphoto.com
To order Nature’s Beloved Son, Heyday Books can be contacted at:
http://www.heydaybooks.com or
(510) 549-3564
Robert A. Schaefer, Jr. is a founding member of Photoworkshop.com, and has been a photographer for over 30 years. His work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York as well as the Bibliothéque Nationale in Paris, France. Most recently he had a one-person exhibition (November 10, 2007 to January 8, 2008) at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts in Montgomery, Alabama his home state. He writes about photography for Double Exposure and The Photo Review in Pennsylvania and teaches photography in the Department of Continuing and Professional Studies at New York University. His work is represented by the Domeischel Gallery, Ltd. as well as W Floyd in New York City and the DeFrog Gallery in Houston,Texas.
Robert can be contacted at rasjrpro@earthlink.net and www.schaeferphoto.com
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Last Updated: Aug 11th, 2010 - 13:36:44
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