Botanical Portraits: On a 1935 Argentinean Book by Ilse von Rentzell with Photographs by Anatole Saderman

Abstract In 1935, the Argentine-German botanist Ilse von Rentzell (1893–1985) published the book “Maravillas de nuestras plantas indígenas y algunas exóticas” (Wonders of our Indigenous Plants and Some Exotic Plants) in Buenos Aires, Argentina, illustrated with photographs taken by the Russian photographer Anatole Saderman (1904–1993). The publication of this book was entirely selffinanced by Von Rentzell herself, and it is one of the first in Argentina to include such a large number of photographs with this much prominence. The collaborative photographic work developed by these authors goes beyond the images included in the book. Working together, they created a corpus of photographs that each of them used in the following years to enhance their personal careers. At the time, these photographs of plants represented a break in Argentine photography, building bridges with the genealogy of botanical photographic publications in other parts of the world.