Photographic Ecology：Plants breathe；photographs breathe

William Schaefer

Durham University

Plants eat light; photographs absorb light.

 

Plants breathe; photographs breathe.

 

Plants and film are both mostly composed of organic matter which is slowly transformed as they interact with natural forces of energy, growth, and decay. Exposed to the energy of light, plants combine water and carbon dioxide to form the chemical energy of glucose necessary for life. Exposed to the energy of light, film––made of minerals (silver halide crystals) suspended in animal matter (gelatin) and supported by a base of vegetable matter (cellulose acetate)––forms latent images that can be processed with liquid chemicals into pictures. Plants and photographs both respond to light, liquids, and atmosphere through the forms and spaces they create.

 

The title of Fu Bailin's body of work,《玄林潛影》Xuanlin qianying, (literally "Obscure Forest, Latent Image"), elegantly suggests such parallels between plants and images, darkness and emergence. Each picture in the series explores these relationships through its subject matter and through Fu Bailin's practice of shooting film, layering the resulting negatives, and painting them with diffuse and intricate brushstrokes of Chinese ink. The trio of pictures, Xuan Forest Numbers 12-14, impose these relationships on the viewer with particular power. Their narrow, vertical shape addresses the vertical orientation common to standing humans and trees––a characteristic few other organisms share––while mediating the relationship of human and tree through the shape of the vertical scroll of a traditional Chinese ink painting. A tree trunk most visibly runs through the center of Xuan Forest Number 12, but looking from Number 12 to Number 13 to Number 14, the visible trunk seems to dissipate into layers of vertical lines and patterns that register the traces of its disappeared presence. In Xuan Forest Number 13, one quarter of the way down from the top edge of the picture, what appears to be an upward flow of traces is interrupted horizontally by an almost liquid black disturbance flowing across the picture. The specific ink Fu Bailin uses––the ink for Chinese painting––is composed of wood burned into soot ground and dissolved in water, so that traces of trees disrupt their own depiction. This liquid disturbance is arguably a visible trace of how for Fu Bailin, as Lu Mingjun observes, "The intervention of painting…became a practice of reshaping the subject [of the artist] in the midst of the 'struggle' between nature and the art of photography." This intervention of painting entails a fascinating giving up of agency. In an interview, Fu Bailin speaks of how the process of dyeing pictures with ink is even more uncontrollable and changeable than the chemical processes of developing a photograph in a darkroom. Indeed, perhaps one might see Fu Bailin's pictures as traces of multiple agencies: of Fu Bailin, of his camera and brush, of the materials and chemicals and water and energy of the photographic process, of the water and soot of the ink, and of the trees and plants together composing the surfaces and spaces of his pictures.

 

Struggles and collaborations between the focused view of the camera and the amorphous natural world have been at the heart of photography ever since it was first invented. To be sure, long before the invention of photography, at least since the time of the philosopher René Descartes, the camera itself has served as a figure for a dispassionate, objectivizing separation of perception from all the sensual, shifting phenomena of the world. In his Optics (1637) and Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), Descartes used the structure of the camera obscura as a metaphor for what he claimed to be the separation of the human mind from nature: like a camera, Descartes thought, the mind perceives the world by means of images formed of light projected and focused from outside through the aperture of the eye. And yet, quite contrary to such oppositions between the camera and the natural world, the idea of photography as itself in part a natural process has quite literally defined it from the moment of its invention. During the early nineteenth century, when Joseph Nicéphore Niépce tried to create a name for the first photographic process he had invented, each possible name he considered combined a different ancient Greek term for a kind of image (e.g. graphé, typos, and ikon) with the ancient Greek word for nature: phusis. Niépce’s list of names, the photography scholar Joel Snyder observes, grappled with the question of who or what causes a photograph by suggesting that, "unlike all other kinds of pictures (which are made by hand)," photographs come into being through a pair of agencies: human agency, which operates the camera and lens, and the agency of natural forces (phusis). According to the anthropologist Philippe Descola, the ancient Greek word phusis does not mean "nature" in the modern Western sense of "phenomena that are independent of human action." Instead, phusis can be defined as "the principle according to which a being is what it is in itself: it develops according to its 'nature.'" Phusis is thus close to the term in Chinese and Japanese, 自然 (ziran, or shizen), as used in texts like the 道德經 Daodejing to indicate the environment and processes of which humans are a part: phusis or ziran, according to Descola, is "what links together and constitutes human beings as multiple expressions of a complex whole that is greater than them." Thus Niépce's difficulty in naming photography, by combining phusis with various terms for "image," identifies a fundamental paradox of the medium. The camera might be a metaphor for the separation of mind from world, human from nature; but the processes by means of which a photo-sensitive surface forms images through exposure to light and development by chemistry are continuous with the processes of nature.  

 

The Canadian photographer Jeff Wall defines this paradox as a confrontation between what he calls "dry intelligence" and "liquid intelligence." By dry intelligence Wall means the optical and mechanical aspect of photography, such as the lens and shutter of the camera and enlarger. With the term, "liquid intelligence," Wall connects the materiality of the medium of film with natural forces and their depiction in photography. Liquid intelligence encompasses the essential roles water and liquid chemicals play in processing and developing film. Unlike the dry intelligence of photography that is both calculable and controllable, liquid intelligence is "unpredictable" and "incalculable"––indeed, Wall writes, water "has to be controlled exactly and cannot be permitted to spill over the spaces and moments mapped out for it in the [photographic] process, or the picture is ruined." But liquid intelligence also encompasses "complicated natural forms" with their "unpredictable contours," whether as depicted in photographs (such as the explosion of milk in one of Wall's most familiar photographs) or occurring in the natural world.

 

In contrast to Wall, the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued that it is the process of painting and not photography that can best picture natural forms, human perception, and their interrelationships. Merleau-Ponty used the medium of photography as a metaphor in his fierce critique of Descartes' separation of the human mind from the natural world, claiming that "the lived perspective, that of our perception, is not a geometric or photographic one," and questioning the idea of substituting "for our actual perception…what we would have to see if we were cameras." However, writing about the painter, Paul Cézanne, Merleau-Ponty explicitly situates such a Cartesian way of understanding photography in relation to biological and ecological processes and the ways picture-making can engage with those processes. He writes:

 

[Cézanne] did not want to separate the stable things which appear before our gaze and their fleeting way of appearing. He wanted to paint matter as it takes on form, the birth of order through spontaneous organization…. Cézanne wanted to paint this primordial world, and this is why his pictures give us the impression of nature at its origin, while photographs of the same landscapes suggest man's works, conveniences, and imminent presence…. The drawing must therefore result from the colors, if one wants the world to be rendered in its thickness. For the world is a mass without gaps, an organism of colors.

 

The remarkable ways in which Merleau-Ponty conceives of Cézanne's painting of nature in biological and ecological terms of matter taking on form, of "spontaneous organization," and of the world itself as "an organism of colors," very much resonates with the idea of 自然 (ziran) as indicating a process of "self-becoming." And while Merleau-Ponty favors painting and denigrates photography, his conceptualization of the relations among artist, nature, and the self-organizing processes of image formation suggest how, on the contrary, film photography can be seen as the mode of representation that itself most explicitly stages the relations between culture and nature, not as a relationship of Cartesian dualism or separation, but rather one of emergence. When, in order to explore what he calls "the mystery and unknowability of trees," Fu Bailin combines photography and ink painting to create a black that is, as he says, not a black to the point where there is nothing, but is rather a black that is rich in tonalities of color (secai色彩), the world in his pictures becomes an organism of monochrome colors. Indeed, when Fu Bailin speaks of the uncontrollability of photographic processes and ink painting in his work––that is, their agency partially independent of his own agency as a photographer and artist––one can imagine that, in Fu Bailin's body of work, to photograph is "to paint matter as it takes on form." 

 

For translated into the context of photography, Merleau-Ponty's phrase, I claim, has a double sense. "To paint matter as it takes on form" means making pictures that depict matter in the process of taking on form, such as the features of landscapes, plants, and trees in Fu Bailin's work. But equally, Merleau-Ponty's phrase can be used to that the pictures that take form through photography emerge from multiple self-organizing (自––然) processes: silver salts clumped together because of the action of light; development by liquid chemicals; the layers of gelatin and cellulose that give film and photographs material substance and gradually decay; and the natural and cultural environments of which the film and photographer and the landscapes depicted are all a part. In photography, in short, the work of forming images is situated at once within and beyond human agency and culture. The photographer's body and camera move through their environments, but also photography is itself an ecology of the interacting agencies of light energy, animal, vegetable, and mineral matter, and liquid intelligence––the surfaces of film and photographs always slowly moving through exposure to light, processing in darkroom, and their gradual decay. A photograph is never really "still." It is merely a moment––even in part a living thing––in ongoing and unending ecological processes of growth and decay and the circulation of energy and matter. Seen this way, photography itself is not primarily a medium of representation. Instead, photography is fundamentally an ecological medium.

 

Xuan Forest Number 2, for instance, is composed of a spontaneous organisation of plants and pictorial space––a world as a mass without gaps. At the upper right, thin stems of foliage appear like liquid trickling down the surface of the picture. But closer looking at the picture's layer upon layer of stems, branches, and leaves does not reveal a solid background or empty space behind the foliage, but rather still more layers of leaves and branches. The trees, that is, compose a pictorial space without clear figure of ground: a plant space. Like the space of a photograph, the space of plants might seem to be still, but actually manifests the ceaseless transformations of ecological relationships. The philosophers Edward S. Casey and Michael Marder have beautifully written of the interrelationships of plants and place in ways I believe can illuminate the pictorial spaces of Fu Bailin's work. They show that trees, like all plants, are not passive, and their space is not simply the ground beneath their bodies. Rather, trees are active in the places where they are rooted, and their activity shapes the spaces of ground and air around them: Their roots burrow through soil and rock in search of nutrients and water; their trunks move upward toward air and light; their branches and leaves, receiving information about their surroundings, unfold and "grow outward around themselves by relying on their exquisitely refined sense of proprioception"; and as they reach outward they intercalate and interact with other trees and other life forms. As a result, "the places of plants are at once real––based in soil, part of the larger realm of 'land'––yet their edges [of roots, stems, branches, and leaves] resist any exact specification," and certainly defy geometric measurement. For "the ongoing growth, decay, and metamorphosis of plants render their edges changeable, mobile, and temporally indeterminate." Paradoxically, then, "plants are at once precisely edged and placed and yet are amorphous when it comes to the place and edge of the plant as a whole."

 

Plant movement and agency are expressed in Fu Bailin's pictures in the ways they constitute pictorial space––indeed, trees are not just depicted objects but, arguably, are active collaborators with the artist. In Xuan Forest Number 35, for instance, Fu Bailin's framing and the twisting reach of the branches together explore and shape the pictorial space with the most virtuoso choreography. A branch curves in and out of the frame on the left, while from the right a branch with a twisting texture mirrors and rotates the left branch's form, rendering its curving sweep upward to the top of the picture all the more dynamic. Another, thinner branch echoes this sharp curve yet again, elegantly reaching through an oval gap in the other branch. Now, to be sure, the plant spaces and ecosystems depicted in Fu Bailin's pictures do not exist out there in the world, but rather are creations in what he calls his "bright room/darkroom" (明室暗房). The movement of branches in Xuan Forest Number 35 is brought out in part because of the ways Fu Bailin uses film negatives instead of positives: indeed, in this and a number of his pictures, the reversal of light and dark seems to emanate a kind of illumination. The trees and other plants intercalate in the spaces depicted in each separate film negative, but one of the effects of Fu Bailin's layering of negatives is to bring multiple layers of branches and leaves into relation with each other and thus further intercalate them on the picture plane. His diffusion and brushstrokes of ink––the liquid intelligence of tree soot diluted in water––further condenses and intensifies the pictorial spaces without gaps, even as ink and negatives work together to obscure and illuminate specific details of foliage. For instance, Xuan Forest Number 11 at first appears to be a bit different from the other pictures in this body of work, as it is the picture with the clearest distinction between the ground of the earth and the background. But the visible ground and the space of the air are themselves only marked and delineated and shaped by countlessly repeated motifs of foliage: the tiny plants whose repeated narrow stalks of small leaves weave together the visible ground, and the sweeping lines and dots of bare branches and leaves animating the air above the relatively placid ground. The picture plane is both flat––the ground only slightly recedes, and instead the picture almost appears as two parallel bands––and textured, a suggestion of obscure (玄 xuan) depths out of which the leaves and swirling branches emerge. Fu Bailin's ink brushstrokes bring out the "brushstrokes" of the plants as they most visibly activate and compose the space with small exploding splashes and blobs of leaves in the lower half, and repeated curving swirls and floating patches of the "brushstroke-leaves" above.

 

Now, in an interview, Fu Bailin has explained that in his work, a film negative is a source material (sucai 素材) that undergoes second processes of layering negatives and dyeing with ink in order to see another face of the forest, and to see even more details from within it. The paradox is that it is precisely this obscuring of the pictures that brings out an intensity of detail. These processes have a powerful effect on the viewer. The scale of the pictures––most nearly or actually life size, or in some cases taller than a standing human––at first might seem overwhelming. But in my experience, the largeness of scale and the textured darkness of the pictures instead brings the viewer in close––close, that is, to focus on small scale details rather than merely seeing the pictures as an inky blackness. In other words, the density produced by Fu Bailin's layering and dyeing with Chinese ink does not allow the viewer to stand apart from pictures of the natural world, separated by their frames––rather, their details which the viewer can scarcely sense from afar beckon the viewer closer to immerse themselves in the surfaces of the pictures, losing sight of the pictures'’ frames as they trace the growth, the reaching, the intertwining, the layers and interconnections of the trunks, branches, and leaves of the trees that together constitute the pictorial spaces of trees.

 

To think of photography as an ecological medium is not only a matter of understanding photographs as living, breathing, and organic. Like ecology itself, photography is also a matter of relationships, flows, and connectivity. Connectivity in ecology does not just run through space; connectivity constitutes space, including pictorial spaces, as Fu Bailin's pictures show. And within the space of the art gallery, the exhibition invites the viewer to consider Fu Bailin's pictures not individually or separately, or even as a series, one after another, but as connected parts of a larger ecosystem: the space of the gallery itself becomes a complex ecosystem formed through the interactions of plants, negatives, ink, and frame, each picture an organism interacting with other organisms. "The artist of today is more than an improved camera," the Swiss artist Paul Klee wrote in 1923. "He is a creature on the earth and a creature within the whole," that is, the artist is "a part of nature in natural space." Fu Bailin's exhibition also makes the viewer a part of nature in natural space: the viewer becomes a seeing and breathing part of an ecosystem of pictures.

 

¹鲁明军，“《玄林潜影》–– 傅百林的绘画––摄影实验“

²Joel Snyder, “What Happens by Itself in Photography?”, in Pursuits of Reason: Essays in Honor of Stanley Cavell, ed. Ted Cohen, Paul Guyer, and Hilary Putnam (Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University, 1993), 361-365.

³Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, translated by Janet Lloyd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 29-30.

⁴Jeff Wall, “Photography and Liquid Intelligence,” in Selected Essays and Interviews (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2007), 109.

⁵Wall, “Photography and Liquid Intelligence,” 109.

⁶Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” in The Merleau-Ponty Reader, edited by Ted Toadvine and Leonard Lawlor (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 73-74.

⁷Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” 73-75.

⁸Edward S. Casey & Michael Marder, Plants in Place: A Phenomenology of the Vegetal (New York, Columbia University Press, 2024), 2-7.

⁹Casey & Marder, Plants in Place, 21-23.

 

Born in Zhejiang Province in 1971, Fu Bailin currently lives and works in Shanghai. His series of works focus on the relationship between natural ecology and cultural engagement, as well as the interplay between traditional craftsmanship and contemporary expression.

 

His practice often stand at the intersection of ecological nature and the self, revealing viewers' individual memories and inner tensions through the portrayal of objective subjects. Professor Gu Zheng has remarked that Fu Bailin's work "blazes a unique trail beyond the two dominant modes to landscape photography in contemporary China," with a focus on "pursuing the visual purity, intensity, and spiritual depth embodied in the image... a seamless integration of natural scenery with the visual expression of individual interiority, thus endowing natural landscapes with transcendence."

 

Guided by his self-developed "bright chamber, darkroom" methodology, Fu Bailin intervenes in images with ink wash and hand-dyeing. This technique captures the rich objective details inherent to photography and presents painterly qualities, allowing painting and photographic materials to mutually interact, permeate, and enter into dialogue with each other.