It is always with an uncertain thrill and a shiver that my professional and research interests collide, mostly always at their best when totally unexpected. And what better day than today on the first day of Autumn, the third of the years' equinoxes, when day and night are of equal length, that on a grey drizzly London morning, editing my Cannizaro archive for 'plant' categories, my research 'From Plant, Planet to Pixel' springs back to life.
Sunlight breaks through, blue-sky thinking emerges, and on I go after a year on hold, exploring, from microscope to telescope, how photographic technologies mediate our experience and understanding of this our precious and most precariously positioned planet.
As so deeply explored by the Frankfurt School confronting the forces of Fascism in the interim years of two world wars, the frontiers of knowledge drawn by emerging technologies, are a rich seam to mine for the potential action and understanding of political and philosophical change.
"The enemy of photography is the convention, the fixed rules of 'how to do'. The salvation of photography comes from the experiment." - Maholy- Nagy.
Images selected below with captions from my one of many Bibles, "Plant, Exploring the Botanical World", (Phaedon Press, 2016). I am indebted to Dr James Compton, Botanist, plant collector and personal hero.
Centre Pompidou, Paris. The rich black and white stark white of this composite flower of a Chrysanthemum indium plat. make it seem almost as if it is a three-dimensional model that has been sculpted out of marble or plaster. In fact, the image is a 'photogram' - a photographic image created without a lens. For Moholy-Nagy, the photogram was a convincing evidence that 'even the complete mechanisation of technics may not constitute a menace to its essential creativeness'.