Edward Step

The Wayside and Woodland series is a beautiful documentation of the plants, animals and insects of the United Kingdom. Edward Step was an author and photographer in his own right who published books for over 85 years, many of which were in collaboration with his daughter who provided detailed illustration studies of the subject matter. With its lavish gold tinted etching and embossed leather, book covers these books may be slightly old and battered but are some of the most beautiful and well thought out book designs I have seen to date.

I have built up a collection of his books since late 2020, but many are hard to come by and can be expensive for a well-preserved copy. This book is a catalogue of trees found in Britain and is aided by the beautiful illustrations of some fruit and shrubs found alongside each tree and its family. The black and white photographs are intended to be factual documentation of each species of tree, but to me, they are something more, they are a part of history; many of these tree species are extinct or dying out and the sole existence of this book provides an insight into the natural world during the late 19th and early 20th century.

Many of Steps’ other books feature the use of early colour photography known as the ‘additive’ process, this again is a fantastic object to be able to look back in time to some of the first uses of colour photography and the context in which they were used.

The text accompanying each photograph describes the characteristics and seasonal changes in the tree’s family and the different types of fruits and flowers they might grow. There is something intriguing about some of the ‘wonky’ compositions of the pictures, like this sycamore-winter, where the bottom of the trunk is cut out of the frame and the branches at the top creep out of the picture. It feels a bit amateur in comparison to photo books that are made by artist photographers, and that follow all those core rules of composing and exposing a photograph. Much like how the Becher’s operated in their strict process for making pictures of industrial sites, Step follows the same pattern; photographing both the full body, trunk and fruits of each tree and what forms throughout the book is a beautiful typology of 19th and 20th-century trees.

The pocket sizing of this book is an aspect that helps define the context in which it might have been used in. One can imagine an avid wildlife and nature explorer sitting quietly flicking through the pages of this book and matching each photograph Step has made to the trees within his view. The mix of that early black and white warm-toned printing combined with the vibrant drawings of the plants that live alongside each tree makes for a deeply passion-filled publication and manual of culture from the past.