In 2000, after spending seven years traversing the American West documenting ranch life, photographer Lindy Smith was eager to stay close to home. She found her next project literally at her feet: documenting the various weeds and plants on the farm she and her husband had just purchased in rural New York. Instead of cataloging them with a standard camera and lens, though, she delved into 19th-century photographic processes. “I had been working in historic printing methods for several years, and began to experiment with these, collecting plants from the property and using them as negatives on various sensitized papers I had coated with platinum or palladium,” she writes in her book, “Leaves and Light: Sunprints of American Native Plants” (Prospecta Press), a collection of her works over the last 25 years.

Over the years, she experimented with watercolor and printmaking papers, various developers, light, temperature, humidity, and exposure times, she explains. As she began creating larger prints of larger plants, she switched to Kallitype, “an iron salt- and silver-based process patented in 1889” that was more affordable than platinum and palladium printing. Eventually, she began applying for artist residencies around the country, where she captured plants native to those regions. In 2010, Smith moved to Iowa, where she continues to document plants native to the upper Midwestern region.

“I have made images early and late in the year; some plants were left outside under glass for as long as two weeks in late autumn rain and low light,” she writes. “With others, in full summer, an hour’s exposure could cause intense sweating from the plants and running of the sensitizer under strong sunlight and heat.” It’s a process she continues to find magical that “still causes a thrill when I look at a print.”   

Amanda Arnold is a senior editor.