"Most of all I liked the exactness with which your pictures record plant form and growth habit," wrote naturalist May T. Watts after a slide showing at the Morton Arboretum on November 24, 1958. "Your excellent work with backgrounds that enhance without distracting was an added feature."

View a selection of Korling's wildflower photographs.

Torkel Korling (1903-1998):
An American Story
Korling's beautiful plant photographs illustrate both the plants and key elements of their ecology

This account was drawn from the reminiscences of Diane Korling, who worked closely with her late husband on many publications and exhibits. In the hearts and minds of people throughout the region, her words and his photographs planted important seeds. Their little books inspired some to go out into the wild and search for plants that looked like the pictures. These searches led to the discovery of several prairie remnants along the North Branch of the Chicago River and elsewhere, which led to the founding of a volunteer restoration movement, which contributed to the establishment of Chicago Wilderness. Words and pictures have power. They can change the world.

orn in 1903, Torkel Korling made his first herbarium collections from the woods and fields above his native town of Halmstad, on the west coast of Sweden. Church music had been a family profession for nearly 400 years but, though he would maintain a lifelong veneration of Bach, his interest turned to the physical world. All through school and gymnasium he assumed his lifework would be in botany or forestry. Then, headed for British Columbia on travels with another student in 1922, he was asked by hosts at a stop in Wisconsin to print them a set of the forest views he was shooting with his tourist camera. That client was the first, with others found once he settled in Chicago. This work let him earn passage home a few years later to inform his parents he was a photographer.

While his professional work for many years was done for clients in manufacturing and advertising, his own favorite subjects came to be those owing nothing to human enterprise, the woods and wild plants remembered from his boyhood in Sweden.

Korling remained more interested in his subject matter than in photography itself. It was to meet the need for mechanical simplicity in capturing unposed expressions of children that he devised and obtained the initial patent on the automatic diaphragm, which provides aperture control for exposure while permitting picture composition through a wide-open lens. Korling also turned his powers of visualization to invention: he built and patented some of the first collapsible portable tripods.

He described himself as an illustrative photographer. His great pleasure as well as accomplishment was in the powers of observation that let him "read" the workings of an industrial plant and then plan a series of interesting looking pictures that could convey the strengths or uniqueness or solidness appropriate to advertising or annual report claims.

Two of his long-time industrial clients — Container Corporation of America (1958) and R. R. Donnelley (1960) — were the first to publish the nature photographs that would come to be the preoccupying subjects of his next career.

The deliberate planning of informational roles for both foreground and background had been a hallmark of his industrial illustrations. Onsite he would confront the need to portray a specific shop floor or manufacturing phase, and worked carefully to compose and illuminate as needed the repetition of work stations or product off into the distance, signifying industrial capacity, but by careful arrangement of focus and lighting. This technique came to be repeated in the botanical illustrations, with just enough of a clearly defined individual up front to identify the species, and the background filled with clouds of unfocused but significant ecological clues: more of the same species, if their habit was to grow in masses, or a scattering of associated species that could help make clear the time and place.

From his childhood Torkel often recalled music, and flowers, and guests entertained at dinner, and then the children chased off to bed. He was the middle child in the home of an accomplished and active musician, Felix Korling, composer, conductor, and organist, in a 400-year line of Lutheran pastors and church musicians. Their home, built above the town of Halmstad, was called Ekebacken, Oak Hill.

Outdoors was where he wanted his children to grow up. When after World War II it became possible to build, Korling selected an "oak hill" northwest of Chicago, beyond the Fox River north of Dundee. Here were scarlet oak, white oak, and bur oak, almost without understory in 17 acres of overgrazed pastureland. There would be a house, a barn for the children’s horses, a guest house, and a spring-fed swimming pool – a "plunge." It would be a playground for Korling, too, with horticultural opportunites abounding on north-facing as well as south-facing slopes and along the spring-fed stream that meandered eastward between them.

On through the 1950s, in the woods at home and on back-country side trips from commercial assignments, Korling was building a file of better and better botanical subjects — a file, however, that nobody wanted. "Beautiful!" an ad agency art director would agree. "However, we don’t have any wildflower accounts."

But one of his Chicago industrial clients saw an advantage in that irrelevance. Subjects nobody was selling were just right to demonstrate the quality printing possible on Container Corporation of America’s newest food-quality white liner board. Thus in 1958, frozen food packaging executives across the country became the first to see Korling’s botanical art: 11 subjects in an attention-getting, over-sized portfolio titled "Wildflowers!"

An even larger audience next saw 20 of his botanical subjects in the format of a small book, Glory by the Wayside, a widely distributed demonstration of quality printing by another of Korling’s industrial clients, R. R. Donnelley & Sons Company. Again the photographs had been selected for their visual quality alone.

When in the 1960s and 1970s Korling turned to intensive efforts at "selling" his botanical work, he built on the acceptance these two publications had received. But there was a shift in emphasis, and with a deliberate intent to prompt a change of focus on the subject. His own series was titled "Wild Plants in Flower" for he was determined, in the spirit of the old botanical illustrators whose work he had consulted as a boy in Sweden, to try to show not just the blossom, but the plant, including, revealing, and emphasizing those attributes that are unique to each species. Korling worked with the conditions the field provided, no flash; he positively avoided sunny days, recognizing shadow as the enemy of detail. He preferred the kind of softly filtered light that Eastman on their film package inserts used to call "cloudy bright".

Like many artists, he yearned for his work to be seen and appreciated. In 1972 he produced and published a simple volume of 64 color prints and called it The Prairie, Swell and Swale. Diane Korling induced Dr. Robert Betz to write an introduction. They printed 40,000 copies using a lithographer from The Netherlands. They sought distribution through camera stores, nature centers, and word of mouth.

Wild Plants in Flower, by Torkel Korling. Chicago Review Press, 1994.

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