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The Botanical Garden, with its almost 250 years of history
connected to the University of Coimbra
as a scientific and educational institution
plays a role in the study of plants
but also as a green area of Coimbra,
at the heart of the uptown area,
and as a link to the river.
We wanted to understand how people viewed the Garden.
 
We opened this call to the population in general,
to send us pictures taken in the Botanical Garden

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from the 19th century,
since the 40s and 50s when photography began,
until the 1980s.
We tried to get ahold of those images that are more difficult to get:
printed images, on film, displayed in personal photo albums
and probably somewhat forgotten by their owners.
We started collecting pictures through an online form
but also in person, by creating events where people came to the Garden
to let us scan the photos they brought.
 
We asked the submitter to associate a story to the image, providing a context:
when was it taken, why it was taken,
what made that moment special to be photographed.
We managed to collect over 100 photographs.
 

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The trust people placed in us, by leaving these images to be shared, is very important.
We selected a set of 20 photos for the exhibition
that represent the type of pictures taken in the Garden
such as visit when younger, a wedding, the class photograph, studying in the Botanical Garden,
but that also represented the diversity of the areas of the Garden,
like the Central Square, the Greenhouse, the Linden Alley, and all the other open areas of the Garden.
These images are important not only for the personal,
private insight they offer,
but they are also data rich scientific documents for us,
as they show the evolution of the Garden
in space and architecture, but also in its plant collection.

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The oldest picture sent is dated to the 1880s,
and the most recent from 1986.
And in those pictures we found some details we had never seen.
Some were related to the spatial organization of the Garden,
such as the existence of railings in certain locations,
the Central Square without the fountain,
an iconic feature that people associate to the Garden
but existing only since the 1950s.
Or a palm tree,  the tallest tree in the Garden in the 1970s
that was struck dead by lightning in the 1980s.
It was of great importance to us that the exhibition would be held in the open air,
to stimulate a dialogue between the photographs and the plant collections

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and, simultaneously, make the most of this architectural configuration
that provides a 300 meters gallery.
We're still open to photo submissions through  our website
or in-hand.
We'd appreciate it, because we had some interesting surprises.
There were many situations in which the sons and daughters
asked their parents for photos
and that created a family reunion around those images, sharing memories.
It is also in a way a citizen science project,
as we're being provided with historical documents that can be analyzed
by different scientific perspectives.
"Photosynthesis" is a very fortunate name,
as it joins our goal of creating a photographical synthesis of the Botanic Garden history
and, at the same time, is the single most important plant process,

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crucial to the world, by producing oxygen,
keeping us alive and sustaining life on earth.
 

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