Emily Dickinson's Herbarium, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
2010
This archival pigment print turns the page of a herbarium into a meditation on memory, solitude, and the natural world. Photographed by Annie Leibovitz in 2010, the work depicts a pressed botanical specimen from Emily Dickinson's personal herbarium, housed at the Houghton Library at Harvard University. The composition is quiet and deliberate, framing the delicate dried flora against the aged paper of the collection Dickinson assembled as a young woman, a practice she pursued with the same methodical attention she brought to her poetry. Leibovitz renders the object with extraordinary fidelity, allowing the soft tones and fragile textures to carry the full emotional weight of the image. The photograph belongs to a body of work in which Leibovitz has turned her lens away from living subjects and toward the possessions and spaces left behind by remarkable figures. In doing so, she extends the logic of portraiture without abandoning it, using material evidence to evoke interior lives. Dickinson's herbarium is a particularly resonant subject: it speaks to her deep engagement with botany, her careful observation of the ephemeral, and the tension between the domestic and the transcendent that runs throughout her writing. The pressed specimen becomes a surrogate self, fragile, precisely preserved, and charged with meaning. Widely exhibited at institutions including the National Portrait Gallery, the Brooklyn Museum, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Leibovitz's work commands serious institutional recognition alongside its cultural prominence. This signed print, measuring 77.5 by 71.8 centimeters, is offered through the Watermill Center Benefit Auction, presenting collectors with a rare opportunity to acquire a work that bridges documentary precision and lyric sensibility at the highest level of contemporary photography.
- Medium
- Archival pigment print
- Overall
- Signed
- Yes
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