Photo Synthesis

By Katherine Ware,
Curator of Photography, New Mexico Museum of Art

What could be more ordinary than a seed? Most of us begin our day consuming them in one form or another, whether as rice, nuts, or beans or else in the more processed form of bread, cereal, or toaster waffle. Indeed, omnivorous humans have been consuming seeds—fruits, nuts, grains—for about 100,000 years. Plants and seeds as we know them weren’t always part of the landscape and their development transformed the way most human beings led their lives. But by now, for most of us, they have become not only an indispensable but also an unremarkable aspect of our world, clinging to the trees in our yards, filling our bird feeders, literally lying around on the ground beneath our feet.

Accustomed to their presence, we don’t often give thought to how extraordinary they are. A seed is a beginning, waiting to happen. Only with the propitious coupling of earth and sun does it come alive. Seeds are paradigms of good design, beautifully suited to their primary purpose of propagation. Within their elegant architecture lies the instruction manual for the complex undertaking of creating a specific plant. They come clothed in some amazing get-ups to accomplish that mission, from hairs and claws to wings and air pockets. In such abundance and inventive form, how could seeds possibly need our protection?

But they do. Because their physical and chemical makeup evolved to operate with maximum success within specific ecosystems, their survival is endangered when those fine-tuned systems change rapidly, as they have in recent years. While species decline and disappearance are a normal part of life on earth, it is not in our best interest to be cavalier about the loss of biodiversity. We forget the extent to which plants sustain us: as food, as anchors for the soil, as medicine, as generators of the air we breathe. Plants’ functions are critical to our survival and other functions that support the system of which we are a small part.

Dornith Doherty’s multifaceted undertaking, titled Archiving Eden, tells the timely and poignant story of present-day efforts to preserve the world’s global biological heritage in the form of these seeds. The artist began the project in 2008 as an extension of her ongoing photographic exploration of the relationship between human and natural environments. The series ultimately evolved into two parts, one with an emphasis on the seeds themselves and the other on the facilities where they are stored.

The resulting body of work is rife with dualities. The juxtaposition of the natural with the artificial is a fundamental aspect of the series, embodying a crucial hybrid approach to the future. For as much as it is an examination of the engineered facilities in which these life-giving kernels are preserved, the series is also a lyrical love song to the real-world magic of seeds. It gives us not only the how but also the why for the road ahead.

Archiving Eden

Seed preservation is hardly a new idea and has long been practiced locally. In the late 20th century, the idea gained international currency in response to a growing awareness of issues such as decreasing agricultural diversity, increasing use of genetically modified seeds, and ongoing evidence of human-stimulated climate change. Like any library or archive, the primary function of seed banks is to preserve information for public well-being and posterity. In this case, what is being saved is nothing less than the genetic information that comprises the world as we know it. The word “archival” in Doherty’s title may evoke images of 19th-century naturalists collecting plant specimens and cataloging them with spidery handwriting. But the contemporary repositories she photographed are state-of-the-art research facilities. No longer pressed between leaves of paper, specimens are now preserved in liquid nitrogen or vacuum-packed in envelopes with the objective of maintaining not just their characteristics but also their viability.

More than 1,700 seed banks are maintained across the globe, with tens of thousands of plants represented therein, their active life spans extended under carefully calibrated conditions. In one part of her series, Doherty concentrates on the major global seed banks that initially captured her attention. During the course of the project, she arranged to work cooperatively with biologists at 20 of the most advanced facilities on five continents, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service’s National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation in Colorado; the Millennium Seed Bank, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in England; PlantBank, Threatened Flora Centre, and Kings Park Botanic Gardens in Australia; and Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway. The extent to which these facilities have proliferated and the level of technology and international cooperation that characterizes most of them is a powerful testament to a high level of concern.

The artist received permission to photograph at Svalbard, a high-tech bunker for the preservation and study of seeds on a remote Arctic archipelago, in 2010. The facility was the impetus for her series and was built to withstand extreme weather conditions as well as powerful physical impact, its extensive holdings protected by everything that current human technology can muster. Here the seeds are collected and archived, many with a tremendous capacity to endure, their potential for life held in suspension. Some can last 200 or more years. Should catastrophe strike somewhere in the world, the cached seeds corresponding to that ecosystem could be summoned to help reintroduce regional plant life.

Doherty’s images give us a behind-the-scenes view of this hidden world of laboratories and storage. Her full-color, documentary-style photographs capture the clinical appearance of these limited-access buildings, far removed from the original habitats of the plants and seeds they house. Within their walls, the tools of science are employed in earnest, not only for study but also to maintain a fail-safe resource in the event of a disaster. Seed banks provide critical resources when severe fire or flood (or other forms of doomsday) wipe out a population of plants. For those who work within, cognitive dissonance must surely be a job requirement, as optimism and engagement must coexist with an awareness that their efforts are made in the face of a possible worst-case scenario.

Archiving Eden

In another part of her series, Doherty shifts from the macrocosm of preservation warehouses to the microcosm of the seeds and plantlets within them, photographing organic subjects in the controlled environment of the laboratory. In keeping with the scientific setting, Doherty makes her photographs with the same X-ray equipment used by staff to assess the viability of the collected seeds. While

her images of the seed bank facilities are in color, most of her photographs of the seeds themselves are monochromatic, a result of the radiography but also serving to concentrate our attention on essentials.

X-ray technology reinforces the sense of scientific inquiry in the series and allows us to look beyond the surface or husk of each seed. Contemporary Western belief in scientific evidence and the objectivity of photography bolster the aura of factuality in these images, yet there is a distinct tension. For while the X-ray imparts a sense of a privileged, technical view of structures invisible to the naked eye, the unfamiliar appearance of these images can stimulate a subjective, visceral response in viewers. For the untrained eye, these images can evoke a disoriented world beyond our everyday reality. The seeds are distinct and radiant, floating in space like alien beings and we see them differently. It is a view inside a secret, a secret we can parse but never fully grasp.

Some of the monochromatic images are blue, reminiscent of the 19th-century botanical photograms of Anna Atkins, who published her groundbreaking photo-illustrated Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions in 1843. Placing her specimens directly onto paper coated with a solution of iron salts (the cyanotype process, invented by her friend Sir John Herschel) and exposing them to sunlight to create photograms (photographs made without a camera), Atkins cataloged the sea plants of England. When exposed to sunlight, the iron salts impart a blue tone to the prints. Atkins quickly recognized photography’s ability to communicate scientific information with greater precision than writing or drawing, though the handmade qualities and blue color of her prints can also be appreciated esthetically.

Like Atkins’s photograms, Doherty’s seed images convey a palpable sense of presence on the page. The photographs give voice and personality to what are, despite being possessed of the latent ability to generate life, fairly unassuming organic nuggets. But unlike Atkins, whose photographs were primarily about description, Doherty purposely employs her artistic license. The blank slate of the lab frees her to use the holdings as raw material for her own artistic compositions, and she uses a variety of approaches to portray the seeds and seedlings, often alluding to familiar visual references from science as well as art. The result is an

evocative synthesis of science and art that uses photography as an instrument of description and exactitude while providing a gateway into the poetic.

In some compositions, the artist organizes seeds into grids and typologies, reminding us of their morphological and biological diversity. In her composition 1,400 Ash Tree Seeds, Doherty assembles seeds from America’s primary seed bank in Fort Collins, Colorado. The seeds were initially collected after the emerald ash borer was accidentally introduced into North America in the 1990s and the beetles began killing tens of millions of ash trees across Canada and the United States. Doherty chose to realize this image in final form as a lenticular photograph, made of three images that are stacked, cut into strips, interlaced, and placed behind triangular-shaped lenses. As viewers move around the picture, it shifts color from green to brown to convey the transition of the seeds as they dry for storage.

These are large pictures on the wall, whose enlargement of detail and repetition of elements draw us into their orbits. Their size emphasizes the volume of seeds represented and allows us a closer view of their forms. Some are placed in arrangements that tease the brain’s desire for pattern recognition and meaning. Sunflower seedlings suggest calligraphy on a page while tiny epiphyte seeds and stems join to resemble a Buddhist mandala or snowflake. Circular shapes serve as cognates for the cycle of life or the sphere of the Earth, inviting us to consider the generative force contained within each small subject. Compositions may evoke the wind, the starry sky, a wild spray of confetti, or a bouquet. Always maintaining a factual rendering of the seeds, Doherty brings in these artistic elements to connect us with her material and to make the connection between the seeds and the universe we inhabit.

In addition to seeds, she photographs small plants, cloned or grown from the archived seeds. Doherty arranges banana clones in a lineup that highlights the delicacy and intricacy of each living plant, granting them animation even in the face of their incarceration. The dance of life is coded in their DNA and held in reserve for an opportunity to become fruitful and multiply. Her images transcend the clinical setting and precision equipment, creating the effects of sensuous line drawings or visually pleasing still life arrangements to communicate the latent vibrancy of the plants.

Science tells us that it takes approximately 5,000 seeds to save an imperiled species and Doherty shows us concentrations of seeds that illustrate that vastness. Her photograph More Than This (made with more than 4,700 seeds) begins to put that figure into a form we can grasp, though even its dense multitude falls short of the goal of preservation. In some images, seeds appear bright against a dark field, like a million stars, one of our most enduring references to infinitude. Yet the artist pointedly titles one picture in the series Finite, bringing us back to Earth with the reminder that abundance is a survival tactic and that the odds can shift quickly if conditions change. And that, indeed, we are all mortal.

With her two-part series, Doherty asserts the need to engage all of our faculties, all of our senses, in the effort to preserve our Eden here on Earth. As much as she articulates the complex issues raised by her photographic exploration of seeds and seed banks, she also strives to make us fall in love with this world all over again, not only for the sheer joy of it but also as a strategy to stimulate renewed involvement. She reminds us to restore our connection with plants and the natural world, to regain firsthand experience and knowledge of them in the face of the depletion of not only our environment but also our culture. She gives us the science and the poetry, two inseparable sides of a coin. A seed is a beginning, waiting to happen.

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