A+E INSIDE: <STAR TURN: Observer’s A&E editor becomes a children’s theater actor for a day. 6
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ARTS + ENTERTAINMENT OCTOBER 27, 2022
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ORCHIDS.
Photos by Spencer Fordin
The Selby Gardens’ treasury has more than 20,000 digital assets, and many of them are stunning photos of orchids. SPENCER FORDIN A+E EDITOR
I
t’s an orchid blown up even bigger than your head. But in reality, it might be even smaller than a baby’s pinky nail. “Capturing the Perfect Shot,” the latest exhibit at Marie Selby Botanical Gardens, is meant to celebrate both the stunning diversity of orchids and also the painstaking work conducted by volunteers in the interest of documentation and classification. Selby Gardens has been cataloguing orchids for 20 years, and at this point, it has a treasury that includes 20,000 studio photos, 28,000 liquidpreserved specimens and 40,000 pressed and dried orchid specimens. But it’s the photos, blown up several times the size of the actual plant, that render details heretofore unseen to the human eye. Technology has advanced to the point where photographers can take several perspectives of one
“Capturing the Perfect Shot invites you to imagine orchids through a camera lens.”
living specimen and turn it into a composite that will be available for study for generations to come. “You have the living plant; there’s nothing better,” says David Berry,
chief museum curator of Selby Gardens. “As an ephemeral thing, the plant changes over the course of the seasons. And of course, ultimately, they pass on.
“It’s not always easy to tell the story of how we got to the plant that you see, or in this case, this sort of beautifully composed photograph. It looks very easy in the end. But to get there is a lot of effort and skill.” The exhibit, which will take you through the tropical conservatory and the Museum of Botany and the Arts, features living orchids interspersed with photographs and devices that ask you to imagine the mechanics of photography. There’s one structure that acts like a lens, magnifying orchids within it, and another that seems like a kaleidoscope. Another display gives you a view through the eyepiece of an actual camera in motion. And if that’s not enough to fire your imagination, there’s even a station where you’ll watch actual volunteers composing a shot. Nathan Burnaman, associate director of horticultural exhibits SEE ORCHIDS, PAGE 2
One station at Capturing the Perfect Shot resembles a kaleidoscope.