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“Electricity was shot through the wire, lighting up the dark room. It ran through the veins of the plant and lit up its architecture.”

St. Olaf College student Rachel Robison ’17 had discovered her passion.

When she responded to an ad about a studio internship, posted by photographer Mark Roberts, Robison was just looking for a creative outlet.

“I knew I wanted to do something more that summer than I was doing already,” she says. “I had a job, but it wasn’t really meeting my artistic desires.”

On her first day in the studio, Robison learned about kirlian photography, an alternative photographic technique that involves the application of a high-frequency electric field to an object, which radiates a characteristic pattern of luminescence that is recorded on photographic film.

Roberts showed her how to put large sheets of film on a metal plate, then place a leaf or a branch on top of the film. After the plant was attached to an electrical generator, electricity would be shot through the wire and through the plant.

“We would take the film, which was now exposed to the light from the plant and develop it in the dark room, and slowly the image would emerge from where the electricity made contact,” Robison explains.

Although Robison had taken several art courses at St. Olaf, she had almost no experience with photography before beginning her internship.

“This was my first experience in the dark room,” she says. “But the fact that I hadn’t taken all digital or all physical media classes in the art department meant I had a certain flexibility.”

In addition, Robison brought technical expertise to her work with Roberts that proved essential. Her Photoshop skills enabled her to clean up and color the kirlian images once they were scanned onto the computer — “a fun, new technique for me because it was a marriage of digital art and painterly art,” she says.

With her graphic design skills, Robison designed the cover of a portfolio case for another series that Roberts had completed. She says that “the courses that taught me how to do graphic design were essential for this internship because they gave me a skillset that complemented Mark’s vision.”

Even her English major informed Robison’s experience in the studio: “I think it helped me with thematic things, it helped me embody what Mark’s series are about, and it helped me really understand everything from start to finish, rather than just churning out a product.”

Because of her interdisciplinary background, “I wasn’t interested in just learning about photography from Mark,” Robison says. “I was interested in everything that comes with his being an artist.”

Shortly before returning to St. Olaf for her senior year, Roberts and Robison exhibited their kirlian photography series, titled The Secret Life of Plants, at the Vine Arts Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

“That was a very rewarding experience — to see the images that I had colored, that I had clicked on so many times, actually on the wall and about a foot wide,” says Robison.

Now, at the end of her college career, Robison has “really come to value Mark as a mentor and a friend.”

Roberts has encouraged her “to look into doing things that seem radically out of my league and to think outside-the-box. He also has said that when I end up doing this, he wants to be a part of it.”

The two are continuing their work together now that Robison has graduated from St. Olaf, putting together a book of The Secret Life of Plants series that will be sold in botanical gardens nationwide. Roberts has handed over the design of this book to Robison.

“I like the role that I’ve had with Mark, the marketing, the design, the putting-together of the art,” says Robison.

And the interdisciplinarity that has guided her experience from the beginning “is a big part of the future too,” says Robison. “It’s given me the opportunity to embrace ambiguity and make my own combination of things as I go forward.”