Harold Wager and the photography of plants

Abstract

The recent surge of interest in the sensory, cognitive and communicative strategies of plant life and the development of neurobotany and phyto-philosophy resumes a debate that briefly flourished in the early twentieth century. Francis Darwin and Gottlieb Haberland then proposed that plants possessed vision and memory, a position rapidly abandoned until its recent revival. A striking contribution to the earlier debate was botanist Harold Wager’s showing of a series of photographs purported to have been taken using lens extracted from plant leaf epidermis. The article will reflect on the status of this photographic practice, in which plants are posed as the photographing subject rather than photographed object, and consider its wider implications for non-human photographic practices.