Edwin Hale Lincoln

(Pittsfield, Massachusetts: published by the photographer, 1935), illustrated with 50 tipped-in platinum prints, ink calligraphic captions on the mounts.  Folio, red half morocco, spines gilt

Wild Flowers of New England is the magnum opus of botanist and photographer Edwin Hale Lincoln (1848–1938), who began his project in the late nineteenth century and continued photographing these wild flowers up until about 1907.  In all he created 400 photographs, issuing the series in parts from 1904 to 1907.  He issued collected editions in 1914 and 1935.  Lincoln's technique was unique.  To capture the beauty of each specimen without further endangering the species, he carefully dug up each plant, wrapped the roots in moss, and carried it back home.  There he nurtured each plant until it reached its peak, taking its picture in the natural light from a window in his studio.  He shot a single exposure of each plant and printed the image by hand on platinum paper.  After the exposure was made, he returned the plant unharmed to the spot in the woods where he had found it.  The results are unforgettable "portraits" of individual flowers and plants.  It is easy to see why these photographs attracted the attention of Gustave Stickley and other artists of the American Arts and Crafts movement.  Lincoln's work stands beside theirs as an essential component of early twentieth-century American artistic sensibility.