Autumnal Equinox
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.
The spines of a Madagascan giant succulent Pachypodium Iamerei add a blur to the outline of its trunk and branches as they reach across this black and white photograph - shot looking up through the tree - by the renowned Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado, whose exhibition Migrations I bought to the Zanzibar International Film Festival back in 2002.
Nobuyoshi Araki's tight focus on the petals makes the flower more reminiscent of the genital imagery of say, Georgia O'Keefe. At the bottom of this close-up of a pink Cymbidium orchid is a fragile sprig of the popular bouquet filler Gypsophila. Although orchids and bridal bouquets carry suggestions of innocence and femininity, but for Araki, female eroticism is a key part of his life's work. But his flower photographs also contain a more spiritual element. The erotic potential of flowers is nothing new in art. Equally, the tenet of Taoist and Zen Buddhist belief reflects the idea that an object's inherent ageing must be understood in order to appreciate its beauty.
This dramatic image of a bud of the weedy flower Tribulus terrestrial in the final stages of its development has a pronounced three-dimensional quality. At this magnification the bud has the qualities of an abstract artwork: episode-illumination, in which light is shone on the object under the microscope, adds an attractive iridescent appearance. Mohaad Reza Dadpour at the department of Horticultural Sciences at the University of Tabriz, Iran, created the image by effectively building it from a series of horizontal sections through the bud.
What at first appears as an exotic ballet costume is in fact a vastly magnified micrograph image of a tiny seed of Scabies crenate, the pincushion flower, a member of the honeysuckle family. For more than a decade the British artist Rob Kessler has been working on the frontier between art and science, producing microscopic views of plant material such as seeds and pollen grains, and highlighting how little we know about the mysterious workings of plant propagation. Kessler applies a fine coating of platinum to his specimens before scanning them with a high-magnification scanning electron microscope to produce black and white images, which he then begins to tint with thin washes of colour.
The primary focus of interest in this depiction of a chrysanthemum flower lies in the quilled structure of the petals and the patterns that are formed as they curve in different directions. The flower's supporting structure is concealed by what the photographer calls 'the immersion of the flower into a void of blackness.' He created his 'Flower' series in 2008 to explore 'mortality, seduction, vulnerability and contradiction.' His choice of plants reflects Confucian symbolism, in which the noble flowers - chrysanthemum, orchid, bamboo and plumb blossom, also know as the 'Four Gentlemen' - symbolises the qualities of a scholar. Chrysanthemum, which blooms in the Autumn, stands for the ability to withstand adversity; the orchid symbolises both humility and nobility; bamboo represents tolerance and adaptability; while plumb blossom stands for inner beauty.
The cream flowers of the Brazil nut tree are captured in numerous stages as they emerge from the green buds in this revealing photograph by the American botanist Scott More, who works at the New York Botanical Garden. Mori's photograph reveals how technical advances have enabled botanists to use high-resolution colour photography as an equally detailed alternative to traditional botanical art.
The structure in this image might look as though they were growing in some alien forest, but they come from the leaf of one of the most homely and familiar of plants; the tomato. Under a scanning electron microscope, the hairs on the leaf are revealed as being of two different types. The pinheads of the 'mushroom' are secretory glands, which exude an oily compound, which gives the plant the highly distinctive odour, familiar to anyone who grows tomotoes. The oil in the hairs acts as an important deterrent against foraging herbivores.
The Scottish artist Alexander Hamilton has spent more than forty years using photograms to record stunning images of plants such as this crocus, which is shown complete with its root system. In his cynotype process, Hamilton places plants and flowers on light-sensitive paper and exposes them to light, before the image is fixed using the 'blueprint' technique devised by the astronomer Sir Herschel in the mid-nineteenth century, which used the insoluble Prussian blue dye that gave the process its name ('cyan' comes from the Greek for 'dark blue').
This alien form could be seen as the visual equivalent of being stoned. Beneath a scanning electron micrograph (SEM), the surface of the bracts on a cannabis plant inflorescence are magnified 35 times and its key parts illuminated.
As modern technology pushes the boundaries of botanical knowledge, it also reveals breathtaking beauty. This alien-looking structure covered in a mosaic is in fact a single stem of creeping fingerwort, a tiny plant that is often mistakenly referred to as a moss, which it resembles in the way it 'creeps' over soil or other surfaces in loose, green mats but it is in fact a liverwort. Without magnification, 'Lepidozia replans' resembles splashes of green, fuzzy textured felt, and is commonly found in the acidic conditions of peaty banks, soft rock faces, rotting logs or the bank of living oaks, birches and conifers. Magdalena Turzanska of the Institute of Experimental Biology at the University of Wroclaw in Poland has won numerous photography awards for her work using fluorescence microscope, which uses ultraviolet light to excite fluorescent molecules in the sample, producing a luminous effect. Here, reddish earthy hues give fingerwort an almost reptilian appearance reminiscent in some ways of Aboriginal art.
Confocal microscopy produces very small depth of field: the operator combines many wafer-thin section views of a subject to create a three-dimensional image. Paves has been using such technology for thirty years to investigate processes in living cells.
Photogram, 23 x 17.2 cm
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'.
This black and white image of the fragrant, pendulous flowers of the borrachero tree Brugmansia suaveolens - known as angel's trumpets - against the dark foliage of the Amazonian rainforest captures their deceptive beauty. Used by indigenous peoples during religious ceremonies, the flowers in fact produce a powerful hallucinogenic drug that can easily be misused, with fatal results.
In this X-ray by the Hong Kong-based histopathologist Dr Gary Yeah, the hybrid Amazon lily (Eucharist x grandiflora) takes on some of the qualities of a designer's blueprint for the creation of some kind of organic structure, with ethereal blue shapes held together by struts of white against a black background. Yeoh's medical career spent peering through a microscope has given a perspective on life and death that few people ever experience, and th is reflected in his flower X-rays. As part of a larger body of work, Yeah has utilised technical skills from medicine to create unique art as part of the 'Mystical Garden Project', an international collaboration to promote cutting-edge botanical illustration and benefit various chaitable organisations.
In this cross section of a pine branch, the irregular green line defines the craggy edge of the pine's bark. A single row of larger, dark vascular cambium cells shows the dividing line between the Chartreuse-coloured wood and the orange tinged bark. The British scientist Sir George Stokes described and named fluorescence in 1852, observing that mineral fluorite emitted red light when illuminate by ultraviolet excitation, and that the fluorescence was alway at a longer wavelength than the excitation light. In the later nineteenth century, experiments with specimens showed that they fluoresce when irradiated with ultraviolet light. But it was not until the 1930s that the potential for using fluorochrome in biological investigations was fully understood.
Texture and shade give a solidity to the dramatic hook shape of the seed pod that gives Medical arboreal its common name, the moon trefoil. The fruit is distinctive, with its flattened spiral husk that remains hanging on the bush throughout the Summer. The Spanish photographer Albert Lleal Moya places the magnified pod against a dramatic black background. In eighteenth century Germany such an approach was characteristic of a school of natural history cabinet painting, as distinct from using local darkening to make pale colours stand out more. Lleal Maya once observed that, growing up in the large urban sprawl of Barcelona, 'curiosity taught me to discover wildlife under flower pots and large oceans in a drop of water.'
By singling out just one tall, willowy stem of 'Purple Majesty' - an ornamental millet that grows up to 1.5 metres tall and that today is often grown in clumps for its dramatic colour - the Venezuelan-born photographer Ron Van Dongen captures the moment at which the young stalk matures and its stem begins to change from green to black. As it matures in turn, the spike will stand upright - some grow 30 cm tall - and turn chocolate-brown., becoming a magnet for pollinating birds.
The prolific Hungarian-born photographer Brassai gives this close-up image of the reproductive organs of a tulip the same erotic quality that he gives the lovers in his better-known pioneering photographs of the streets of Paris. Pollen is scattered over the shiny petals and the stigma appears to glow with fecundity. The flower is in full bloom, but its moment has almost passed. Its precise stage of development is unclear, and that is part of Brassai's intention: 'For me the photograph must suggest rather than insist or explain.'
The composition of the upright and curling fronds is the creation of the American photographer Bryan Whitney, who employs a range of techniques, including X-rays, to produce remarkable images that reveal the internal structures of his subjects. This monochrome image has been digitally adjusted and coloured to produce the finished artwork. In Whitney's portraits of plants, this method reveals otherwise invisible elements of the internal structure. Whitney studied teh psychology of art at the University of Michigan and has also taught at the International Centre of Photography at the Centre for Alternative Photography in New York. His work has been widely exhibited.
The rich blues and reds of this granadilla, a vine native to the American tropics, loom out of the black background, emphasising the remarkable petals whose stripes resemble the spines of a tropical fish. The lustrous colours - achieved by photographing in low light on a H2D-39 Hasselbad digital camera - have been likened to those of Old Master painters, above all, the preeminent flower artist 'Velvet' Breughel, nicknamed for the lifelike texture of his petals. The image is one of hundreds taken by the American podiatrist-turned-photogapher Jonathan Singer after his early large-scale images impressed curators enough to gain him access to the collections of the Smithsonian Institution. The result 'Botanica Magnifica', a collection of 250 photographs divided into five volumes (including one on gingers alone), published in 2009 in a limited edition of ten hand-bound copies.