Botanizing the Asphalt is a limited edition artists’ book by Nanna Debois Buhl designed and published by Officin. The hand bound book reproduces 60 full page cyanotypes - an early camera-less photographic technique - in which discarded objects take on an ethereal, almost ghostly appearance. The objects have been collected on walks in Long Island City, Copenhagen, and Riga. A shoe, a coffee cup, a feather, a leaf. The project takes an outset in Walter Benjamin’s description of the urban wanderer as one “who goes botanizing on the asphalt” and the work of the 19th century British botanist and photographer Anna Atkins who catalogued British algae in her publication Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions. Weaving together Benjamin’s notion, Atkins’ method and traces from urban space, Botanizing on the Asphalt captures a moment in time before the discarded objects are again scattered, whirling into new directions. In the book’s letter exchange between Nanna Debois Buhl and art historian Jen Kennedy they consider the life of objects, the porousness of the skin, and the meaning of mapping a city through trash by use of cyanotype.