This 18-work exhibition at Soho Photo Gallery in NYC featured portraits of U.S. Civil War soldiers and mourning family members developed in the flesh of leaves. Additional works in the exhibition are made when Schultz arranges leafprints on a flatbed scanner in composition with plants from his wife’s flower gardens.

Artist’s Statement

In 2024—this pivotal year—we inhabit ecological crises and emergency-level political division. And in this context I return to the catastrophe of the American Civil War to offer work that refocuses our common humanity. Poet Walt Whitman speaks to us out of his own time of crisis, evoking as memorial “the land entire” where so many bodies fell, were lost, and have been, as the poet predicted, “in Nature’s chemistry distill’d . . . in every future grain of wheat and ear of corn, and every flower that grows, and every breath we draw.” People are like leaves, multitudinous, similar, but individual, and we, like the leaves, emerge, grow, change, and fall. As with a leaf, each chlorophyll print is unique: it is not the picture of the leaf, but the leaf itself. In this way the medium honors its portrait subjects whom we must confront face to face in a unique work and not in an editioned duplicate. And if we can recover a sense of each other as individuals, we may have a chance.

Press Release: Robert Schultz wins international art award, will exhibit at Soho Photo Gallery, NYC

One Root exhibit page at Soho Photo Gallery’s website