The Face on the Leaf

Accra Shepp can’t remember exactly what made him decide to try printing portrait photographs on leaves.

The biggest inspiration, he says, thinking back on how the idea came to him almost 30 years ago, was 19th-century silhouette photography. Something about that style of image spoke to him. It was, he felt, “people trying to outrun death.”

“It was people trying to be known in a way that was so intimate and direct,” Shepp says. “And something about this shadow was consonant with the idea of a dried leaf, which itself was a kind of shadow.”

That whisper of an idea sparked him to invent a new process to bring his vision to life. “It occurred to me shortly after I did this that no one’s ever done this before,” he remarks. Shepp, a photographer, artist, and writer who has exhibited his work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the International Center of Photography, MoMA, and many other museums, created an artist’s book, Atlas, in 2009, which combines many of his most intriguing and innovative processes. This includes collotypes on leaf—a personal adaptation of an old process in which light-sensitive, gelatin-coated film is transferred to a leaf— and leaf “shadow,” in which a leaf printed on one page bleeds through to the opposite page, creating a shadow motif. The Getty Research Institute acquired a copy of the book last year.

In June 2026, Atlas and other photographs on leaves by Shepp were the focus of the Research Institute’s Spring Conservation Study Day. These types of events are regularly hosted by the Institute’s conservation labs and provide the opportunity to discuss conservation strategies and learn more about materials and processes, often from the artists themselves. Shepp shared more about his unique art form and the ways it bridges nature and humanity.

Taking photographs, choosing leaves

Though the style of the portraits connects them with 19th-century examples, Shepp took all the photographs. A diverse range of people inspire him: a tea trolley worker in Indonesia (“the most amazing-looking man I have ever seen”), migrant farmworkers from Mexico, and friends like Korean-American artist Jin Lee.

The process of pairing a portrait with a leaf is intuitive. “There has to be some level of dialogue between the portrait and leaf, and it’s hard to know far in advance if a particular portrait will work on a particular leaf,” Shepp explains. “But if I have a strong sense of, ‘This is a person I need [to photograph],’ I will make a portrait, and then I’ll go through my collection of leaves.”

Shepp has collected leaves from around the world. Most of the ones in Atlas are from New York, where he lives. For other leaf projects, he’s used specimens from Miami (a seagrape leaf common to the area), Indonesia (a banana-like leaf), and the southern United States (tobacco leaves he paired with images of the farmworkers who grew them). All feature a large, flat surface that can fit a photograph made on an 8-by-10-inch view camera.

How he does it

Through “quite a bit of trial and error,” Shepp developed a multistep process for printing his photographs on leaves in Atlas. First, he developed the film on a plate coated in silver gelatin. Printer Ed Fausty then transferred each image to a rubber “blanket,” then printed the rubber blanket onto the corresponding leaf, which had been dried and flattened.

Then, papermaker Paul Wong at Dieu Donné Papermill dipped a mold into pulp made from cotton and abaca to make the paper, then set the leaf in the mold according to Shepp’s instructions. Finally, he dipped the mold a second time into a very thin pulp. It was so thin, Wong said, that it looked like he had just coated the leaf with water. It was only after drying that the fine network of fibers was visible.

This network of fibers was not even tissue thin, which Shepp thought might be a little delicate for the demands of a book, so he misted all the leaves cast into the paper with a dilute mixture of archival adhesive to create a durable film on top. Each of the 24 copies Shepp made of Atlas is unique, since every set of photographs was printed on different leaves.

Shepp admits that when he first created this process, it never occurred to him an image would actually be visible. “I thought: ‘Well, the leaf is going to be a tough customer. Maybe I’ll see just the shadow.’ And the first leaf I printed, I was just blown away,” Shepp remembers. “It was all there. I didn’t think that was going to be possible.”

You might expect the leaves to degrade over time. But Shepp found that while modern industrial paper may be fragile, leaves are surprisingly durable. “Leaves do not self-destruct spontaneously. That’s an image we have of them because we see them in the natural world where there are all these physical processes like 18-wheel trucks and human beings running over them, kids rolling in them, and the rain, wind, and sunlight degrading them. However, if you took a piece of ordinary paper and put it side by side with a leaf and gave them the same treatment, the paper wouldn’t last a week or two. The leaf would be going for months.”

The body and earth combine in Atlas

In Atlas, Shepp explores the relationship of the human body to the earth. For example, Americans measure distance with feet, the French measure distance with the pouce (thumb), and the British have a system for measuring the heights of horses with hands. “The idea that the human body becomes the yardstick by which we know the world is something that’s shared by many, many cultures. And so that was the genesis for Atlas,” Shepp says.

Using images, prose, poetry, and music, the book explores science as well as its precursors, alchemy and myth. Shepp’s portraits on leaves exemplify this connection between humans and the earth in a wholly original way.

“In Atlas, [the leaf] stands in for the earth itself,” he says, “because the leaf is the thing that comes most directly from the earth.”

When Shepp talked at the Spring Conservation Study Day, conservators, historians, scientists, curators, archivists, and other art professionals asked questions about his process, inspiration, and career. He also shared more about his other work—for example, the photographs he took documenting the Occupy Wall Street protests—and how his desire to capture the essence of his subjects is woven throughout his artistic practice.

“I want to know who they are so the audience can understand who came that day, who presented themselves to be present, who spoke with their body,” Shepp says. “That’s the same understanding I sought when I was making Atlas, and when I’m making a leaf portrait. I want to know this person.”