Brasilia gets a “photographic garden” exhibit commemorating anniversary of the city’s Botanic Gardens

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Brasilians and visitors to the capital city will find the walls of the exhibit area of Brasilia’s Botanical Gardens are blossoming with stunning natural beauty in an exhibit with splashes of color and photographed botanical life through the lens of German-born and longtime Brasilian-resident photographer Christoph Diewald.

His commemorative exposition, “Um Jardim na Minha Lente,” organized by the Jardim Botanico de Brasilia and produced by Pictura Fine Art explores the remarkable beauty and variety of plants that can be found at the botanical gardens and in the Cerrado biome of central Brazil. The exhibit opened on March 4, and it runs through March 13.

The photographs’ larger-than-life perspectives are unique because of their considerably complex composition and execution. There is a reverence in Diewald’s lens, and it is evident in the way he captures excruciating details that give you macro views of leaves, petals, and pistils, and the tendrils that stretch out and twine around below a flower.

It takes considerable patience, talent, art, and skill to complete that composition.

Diewald is a self-described amateur photographer but an expert behind the lens even so. His photographs elicit a very visceral connection to the nature that you see through his work. It is art that allows the joyful gift of observing the intricate textures of the flowers, individual petals, the leaves, or something else entirely.

It is an opportunity to get up-close with these plants, to feel them with your eyes, and to almost smell them as you get lost in the expertly showcased detail.

The concept for the exposition came from a mentoring project when the 74-year-old Diewald was spurred and inspired into a collaborative project to display his art. It led to the careful selection of 25 pictures of flowers and leaves from a databank of over 1000 of his pictures. Diewald himself has thoughtfully curated the exhibition to project a sense of wonder and mystery through their display and interaction.

There is a meditative quality to some of his photographs, and that comes from a Zen exploration that taught him to let the subject of his art reveal itself in his meditating mind.

In his photographs one sees parallels with the eloquence of 1980s renowned American photographer Robert Maplethorpe, an unconscious kinship Diewald recognized after-the-fact, when exposed to the powerful work of the master photographer.

Self-taught without any formal photographic instruction, Diewald has developed techniques of his own that are evident in his use of negative space, depth of field, leading lines, and framing that give his work impact in their detail, making them engaging to the viewer.

To take in all the splendor of the exposition requires patience to immerse yourself in each piece of a plant so carefully focused that the senses and the mind have to reconcile the knowledge that it is merely nature and beauty captured so well that it does not seem real.

The rewards can be life-enlarging, as when suddenly seeing the reticulate venation on the back of a leaf in labyrinthine detail; this texture, like life itself. interconnected with the whole, complicated in its structure, smooth in its beauty from afar, in elaborate grainy nearness to your senses.

Looking like an up-close view of a supernova explosion in the heavens, a picture of a thousand yellow pedicels ending on dense packs of small white florets is the type of photo that can take your breath away and take you on a journey into the wonderland of the minute life of flowers.

The art and skill behind the ability to put that image in front of you come from a lifetime of experience seeing life in its important, often unseen detail, not all of it behind a lens. Diewald came to Brasilia in 1994 as a World Bank economist focused on the conservation of tropical forests.

Here, his childhood love for photography and photographing plants encountered the opulence of plant species and the mechanisms to protect and preserve their diversity.

Entwined with his respect and appreciation for nature, put his lens and focus on the plants of the Cerrado savannah and the rich examples of plants endemic to the area, Diewald has been perfecting his art and botanic photography style with a passion that reflects not only the talent but also the inner beauty and aesthetic of the artist.

Recognized by the capital city’s Botanic Gaden in its effort to integrate art and nature, Diewald’s art and style are now on display for Brasilia to see, but the real richness is on both sides of the lens, in the exuberance of Cerrado flora so splendidly captured, and in the eye and the art of Diewald. Both enrich the culture and beauty of the area.

The show celebrates the March 8th anniversary of the Botanical Gardens and continues through March 13 in the Exhibit Hall of the botanical garden’s Visitor Center. Open Tuesday through Sunday, 9 A.M. to 5:30 P.M.