We are pleased to announce A Botanical Affair, an exhibition of works by Swedish artist and photographer Helene Schmitz, at 212 Photography Istanbul. An affair suggests desire, secrecy and a relationship that exceeds its official terms—and that is precisely the territory Schmitz enters in her encounters with the botanical world.

A Botanical Affair brings together three bodies of work in which the flower becomes both object of desire and object of scrutiny: admired, cultivated, classified and, at times, dissected.

For more than three decades, Helene Schmitz has explored the complex relationship between human culture and the natural world. Working predominantly with large-format analogue photography, she creates meticulously composed images in which landscapes, plants and natural phenomena become stages for questions of power, knowledge, desire and threat.

Plants occupy a particularly important place in Schmitz’s practice. A Botanical Affair presents works from three distinct projects centred on the botanical world: (A Passion For Systems, Blow Up, Carnivores). Rather than approaching plants simply as subjects of beauty or scientific observation, Schmitz investigates the cultural histories embedded within them.

Her photographs draw on the long tradition of botanical representation, from the Enlightenment’s ambition to classify and organise nature to contemporary systems of cultivation, extraction and control—concerns that become increasingly prominent in her later work.

The plant becomes both an object of human knowledge and something that resists that knowledge: living, changing and ultimately impossible to fully contain or control. This tension is particularly evident in Schmitz’s work on invasive species, where plants that have been labelled as unwanted or threatening challenge our assumptions about what belongs in a particular landscape and who has the authority to decide.

Throughout her botanical works, Schmitz creates images that are at once sensuous and unsettling. Their apparent stillness often conceals processes of transformation, struggle and survival. Nature is never presented as separate from human history; rather, it appears as something continually shaped by our desires, interventions and exploitation.

Schmitz’s engagement with Carl Linnaeus and his system of classification adds another layer to this inquiry. The eighteenth-century attempt to establish order within the natural world was also an attempt to make nature legible and controllable. Schmitz revisits this history from a contemporary perspective, drawing attention to the intimate relationship between botanical classification, sexuality and desire.

Her flowers are therefore never merely flowers: they become charged with questions of gender, reproduction, attraction and the human impulse to categorise life.

This historical perspective connects her botanical works to Schmitz’s broader concern with humanity’s impact on the environment. Whether photographing plants, forest plantations, quarries or coastal landscapes threatened by rising sea levels, she repeatedly returns to the threshold where natural processes encounter human intervention. Beauty and disturbance coexist in her images, revealing a world in which the boundaries between the natural and the cultural have become increasingly difficult to maintain.

Schmitz’s work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including Nationalmuseum Stockholm, Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde, Fotografiska Stockholm and Fotografiska New York, Thielska Galleriet and Galerie Maria Lund in Paris.

Her photographs have also been published internationally, including in collaboration with National Geographic Magazine, bringing her distinctive exploration of the natural world to audiences beyond the gallery.

Across her career, Schmitz has developed a distinctive photographic language in which scientific history, botanical knowledge, environmental change and visual beauty intersect. Her photographs invite us to look again at what we think we know about nature—and to consider whether the things we have tried hardest to classify, control and possess may be precisely those things that remain beyond our control.