By Lesley Parilla, Field Book Project
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Near view of native vegetation on sand-steppe near Heidesheim, Germany, taken by Bohumil Shimek, 1914. Photograph documents geological and botanical observations. The children are not identified. SIA2012-3229. |
Anyone reading my blog posts has probably noticed I tend to include more photographs from the field books than images of text. I choose photographs because they often have more visual impact when I give an overview of a collection’s contents. Blogs are so short that I rely on the ability of a photograph to inspire an emotional reaction from the reader.
Photographs commonly straddle the line between the personal and profession side of the scientist. Usually the majority of detailed scientific content comes from the text, and photographs augment. To this end, I try to catalog the images in a collection last, so that I will have in mind locations and circumstances the photographer is documenting. In the case of Bohumil Shimek, I wish I had done the images first.
Shimek is an anomaly for me in several ways. He did not work at the Smithsonian; his specimens and field books came to the Institution after his demise. Also, Shimek recorded everything in his field books. Most scientists I’ve cataloged limited details to scientific documentation and personal observations, since field books were usually being sent back to the departments of Natural History. They would not usually include information about other pursuits. Shimek includes details about his other interests and other jobs in midst of his field work documentation. This meant finding notes about repairs for area elementary schools, land survey notes, and details about meetings relating to immigration rights, between details of observed geological formations and related vegetation. Given Shimek’s background in geology, zoology, and botany, his field notes make for fascinating snapshots of biodiversity, but they scattered among a lot of information that is not within the parameters of the Field Book Project.
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Q macrocarpa var. depressa. Prairie border. S.W. corner of Lyon county, Iowa. SIA2012-3228. |
His personal and professional focuses became a bit muddled for me. Ironically, his photographs are the most consistently, scientifically focused part of his collection. Most of his photographs are in one of four boxes, in groupings of eight, most with a description of the location, vegetation, and geology. I can’t begin to tell you how clear his work became when I started cataloging these!
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[59] Wind gauge and unidentified field equipment on hillside. SIA2012-3232. |
There is another reason I love these photographs so much. I grew up where Shimek did much of his field work. During my childhood, my family routinely drove 8 to 12 hours through the Midwest. I spent lot of time staring out the window of the car, looking at the landscape between Iowa and Missouri. My main focus was trying to determine how close we were to our destination, and save my mother from another “are we there yet.” I watched for any variation, including the groves of trees that dot the landscape foretelling of farm complexes, wind breaks, or rivers and creeks, as well as formations like the bluffs along the Missouri river or exposed limestone along the interstate heading to Kansas City. I never really had a good notion of why these changes occurred. Lo and behold many years later, working at the Smithsonian, I cataloged a scientist that studied and documented these very topics. And, in the course of it, I learned the geography of my childhood.
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