UNSEEN PHOTO FAIR 2026: BLOOM: Reclaiming Presence Through Botanical and Photographic Memory by Dagmar van Weeghel

BLOOM is a four-year project by Dutch artist Dagmar van Weeghel, made in collaboration with women of African descent across Europe. It addresses a major gap in the 19th‑century European visual archive: between photography’s invention (c.1839) and 1900, images of people of colour – especially cartes de visite of women – are rare, anonymous, or absent. Legal timelines (e.g. Britain’s slave trade ban in 1807, emancipation in 1833; Dutch manumission in 1873) partly explain but do not justify that recorded histories privilege whiteness and erase plural lives.

Each BLOOM portrait is co‑authored: participants contribute life histories, reflections on migration, belonging, and visibility, and share in the project’s proceeds. Van Weeghel does not speak for them; her practice exposes the visual frameworks that constrained or erased their presence and creates space for fuller representation.

The work deliberately uses 19th‑century tools and techniques – an original 1868 carte de visite camera, hand‑colouring with self‑made floral pigments, and anthotypes (camera‑less prints made by exposing flower‑pigmented paper to sunlight) – to question photography’s claim to truth. Rather than nostalgic mimicry, these methods reveal photography’s constructedness and its historical bias about which lives merited preservation.

Botanical history functions as both metaphor and material. Inspired by an 1818 French manual later republished as The Victorian Language of Flowers – which catalogued roughly 300 floral meanings used socially in the 19th century – BLOOM engages floriography: a popular, often secret language that encoded feelings and social codes. Many floral meanings were bound up with gendered and racist Victorian pseudoscience.

Van Weeghel uses petals gathered across the Netherlands, France, Scotland, and England to make pigments. The anthotypes and floral pigments trace plant circulation through trade and empire, drawing parallels between botanical translocation and diasporic movement. This material linkage highlights how ideas about origins, usefulness, and invasiveness travel through natural and social systems. Platinum–palladium prints, which have the best longevity, were produced to ensure archival permanence.

Van Weeghel’s personal position – as a white European and mother of mixed‑heritage children – frames the project as an act of responsibility and proximity. BLOOM is not an attempt to rewrite the past but to widen the archival frame: an intervention that foregrounds co‑authorship, dignifies presence, and seeks long‑term visibility. By collapsing historical distance into contemporary reckoning, it treats photographic history as ongoing and calls for acknowledgment, accountability, and care for the images we pass on.