Botanicals, an exhibition of floral photographs to coincide with this years’ Chelsea Flower Show. The exhibition spans over a century of botanical photography from the early pioneering work of Fox Talbot, rare photogravures by Karl Blossfeldt, to the contemporary Robert Mapplethorpe, Nobuyoshi Araki and the first UK exhibition of striking new colour work by Ron van Dongen.

The flower has always inspired artists and photographers alike. The photographers in this exhibition all had different motivations for using the flower as their subject matter. Fox Talbot used flowers for their intricate 2-D shapes in his “talbotypes”, Karl Blossfeldt, just after the turn of the century, used organic forms to teach sculpture at the Berliner Kunsthochschule in Berlin. Blossfeldt's home-made camera magnified the forms up to 30 times, producing some of the most intricate botanical photography to date. More recently, Ron van Dongen’s photographs stem from his use of flowers in place of human sitters whilst experimenting with light and the tonal range of human skin. He found, instead, a deep understanding for the delicate nature of the flower captured in his contemplative photographs. The contemporary selection will also include the work of Robert Mapplethorpe and the sexually charged photography of Noboyashi Araki who held his first retrospective exhibition at the Barbican late last year.