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Photographer works with a scanner to enlarge plant life

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Submitted Photograms by Julia McLemore will be on display at the Springfield Museum of Art through Aug. 9.

Julia McLemore's fertile idea acts as Miracle Grow

By Andrew McGinn, Staff Writer Updated 11:49 AM Sunday, June 28, 2009

It starts with a regular ol’ hibiscus or hosta or begonia or geranium.

Then, bathed in the warm glow of radiation, it grows to monstrous sizes, attacks a city and has to be weeded by the National Guard.

That is, if only Julia McLemore’s large floral photograms weren’t so darn pretty.

“It’s all about the beauty of it,” the Columbus photographer explained. “I hope people get the same kind of sensation from it.”

McLemore will open an exhibit of her work, “New Botanicals,” this weekend at the Springfield Museum of Art.

Giant plants would seem to be the stuff of ’50s sci-fi — or maybe the man-eating Audrey II from “Little Shop of Horrors” — but her floras come in peace.

And they thankfully haven’t yet developed a taste for human flesh. (Although you might want to steer clear of the mums.)

Scanning plant life from her own garden onto a computer — it’s not exactly atomic radiation, but always remember to close the lid — you’ve never seen a gardenia quite like this.

“You just get a great sense of the texture and the richness of the color in such an intimate way,” said Charlotte Gordon, museum curator. “It gives you a new way of looking at plant life, and I’ve been a gardener for many, many years.”

The prints, some of which are close to 5 feet in length, end up mixing the beauty of a Georgia O’Keeffe painting with the scientific awe of a National Geographic photo.

“Some people do think they’re watercolors,” McLemore said.

It’s easy to see why — using tweezers, she arranges various plants and flowers on the scanner glass the same way a painter looks at their canvas.

“There’s just a ton of trial and error,” she said.

Photograms, if you’re wondering, are basically photographs made without a camera. The legendary Man Ray mastered the style in the 1920s by placing objects on a sensitized piece of paper and shining light through them.

That was before the digital age.

No darkroom needed anymore. A computer scanner has all the light that’s needed.

“You can do all sorts of interesting art projects with the scanner,” McLemore said.

The roots of her work came about while teaching at Ohio State University as a grad student in the late 1990s.

“We were just showing them what this machine can do,” she said, “other than just sticking a document in it.”

But the real seeds were planted on Sept. 11, 2001, when, at home on that day of tragedy, McLemore began photographing extreme close-ups of flowers.

“It’s a way to find peace and beauty,” she said, “in a difficult time.”

And as our lives have resumed at an even more hectic pace, her microscopic photograms are an excuse to stop and smell the, well, you know.

“In our hurried schedules,” Gordon said, “these are showing us that we overlook a lot in our daily lives.”

For McLemore — whose husband, Bill, is from Springfield — art is actually a second career.

After 15 years in advertising, she enrolled in the Columbus College of Art and Design in the early ’90s. She was 39 at the time.

“I thought art was something that would just spring from your head,” she said. “If you’re passionate about it, you can learn a lot. It’s a learned skill.”

She was inspired to enroll in art school after her mother suggested she do so — just two days before her mother passed away.

“I took a class in art history,” McLemore recalled, “and photography was across the hall. That’s how the whole thing started.”

Aging the flowers before scanning them — the edges often get nice and crispy — is only something an artist would do.

“They’re not perfect advertising flowers,” she confessed.

Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0352 or amcginn@coxohio.com.