This Earthen Door — Amanda Marchand & Leah Sobsey. Published by Datz Press.
One needs only to open This Earthen Door to be struck by the beauty and singularity of Amanda Marchand’s and Leah Sobsey’s collaborative three-year project reimagining Emily Dickinson’s mid 19th century herbarium which is now kept in dark storage in Harvard’s Houghton Library.
A project deep with research and staying as true as possible to Dickinson’s own rigorous methodology, This Earthen Door is a book of 66 gorgeous color plates made in the historic anthotype process using digital negatives of the now sequestered original.
Marchand and Sobsey partnered with botanists and scholars and grew their own flowers at home in Quebec and North Carolina choosing specimens that would crossover to Dickinson’s garden and theirs. These plants then provided the plant-based emulsions for both the herbarium plates as well as the brilliantly color-washed pages in front and back of This Earthen Door – a visual pleasure of alchemy.
Cheryl Van Hooven is a photographer and writer based in New York and often working in the California Mojave Desert. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the New York Public Library, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints & Photographs, Imagery Estate Winery Permanent Collection at Sonoma State University, among others. She is currently working on a photo/text book.