RWFA is thrilled to be back to the Park Avenue Armory for the photography art fair known by its acronym - AIPAD - where we will premiere Understory - Misses Griffith and the NYBG, a new photography project by Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey. As they did with last year's presentation of the Emily Dickinson inspired project, This Earthen Door, this body of work is an homage to the career of another woman artist, Fleda Griffith. Ms. Griffith (or as she referred to herself as in her business cards: “Misses Griffith”) started her career for the New York Botanical Gardens as a freelance photographer in 1919 and over the next twenty years evolved into the official staff photographer.

Understory is a materials-driven photographic project by Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey that investigates the intersections of botanical archives, women’s labor, plant life, climate disruption, and the enduring legacy of land stewardship.

Expanding on their earlier project, This Earthen Door, which examined the herbarium of Emily Dickinson through the historic, plant-based anthotype process, Marchand and Sobsey’s new body of work continues to push the material boundaries of photography. Drawing from the NYBG’s extensive archive, the project highlights the contributions of women who have historically remained at the margins of scientific and photographic recognition. Central to this inquiry is Fleda Griffith, a largely overlooked, early twentieth-century photographer whose work as the Garden’s staff photographer played a critical role in shaping its visual archive. By re-engaging Griffith’s legacy, the artists reframe questions of visibility and historical memory. The artists center on a suite of images from Griffith’s oeuvre, medium format negatives, prints, lantern slides, print catalog images etc. re-animating them with flower pigments.

In parallel with their archival research, the artists have produced a new series of photographs within the NYBG’s Thain Family Forest. The old-growth forest, situated within New York City along the Bronx River, covers 50 acres and is home to 300-year-old trees, now increasingly threatened. The Thain Forest exists in striking tension with the surrounding urban skyline and underscores the project’s broader meditation on time, ecological precarity, and conservation. The artist have produced two composite works using pigments from trees in the forest collected in their neighborhoods, and with the help of their consulting forester, Peter Grima. Understory positions photography as both a tool of preservation and a site of ongoing material and conceptual change.