What’s happening in Vienna: Two Views On Plants
At the Natural History Museum of Vienna, the exhibition Two Views On Plants by Sebastian Cramer showcases photography conceived through the technique of stereophotography (or stereoscopy). Visitors can enjoy it in the usual way, or — for those eager to lose themselves in details — in 3D, using anaglyph glasses (like those from the movies) provided at the entrance.
The fascination of the exhibition lies primarily in its subjects: plants and flowers of various species preserved in herbaria that document and safeguard extensive botanical collections. The Vienna museum’s botanical collection alone holds around 5.5 million specimens.
Some of the works allow the viewer to explore the smallest and most delicate details of flowers and leaves, capturing side by side both the tenderness and the sharpness of certain species. The shapes appear unusual — sometimes soft and rounded, sometimes pointed, perforated, or even reminiscent of spiders with tiny bodies and long, thin legs. At other times, it feels like observing nature under a microscope.
© Sebastian Cramer
But what struck me most were the artist’s explorations of symmetry and the passage of time:
Cramer uses a moving focus to imprint the visible flow of time onto the image. The result may look like a printing error, but here the shapes and lines are deliberately elongated, the containers distorted until they become new objects, their contours sometimes purposefully blurred in the digital recording, sometimes sharp and well-defined.
And with his Mandala series, the artist focuses instead on symmetry and repetition. He creates mirrored images that, thanks to the 3D glasses, transform into sculptures or portals to be admired from the threshold — gazing toward infinity, unable to step inside the worlds unfolding before us.
Sebastian Cramer (b. 1962) is a German director, cinematographer, and photographer, widely recognized as an expert in 3D technology. The exhibition at the Natural History Museum in Vienna continues directly from his photographic book published in November 2022, where the artist aims to bring back to contemporary photography one of the oldest and most fascinating techniques in the medium’s history.
