Inspired by surimono: Integrating photography and poetry to bring plants into focus

Robert Coe,Nicholas M Lee,Anne Osbourn

doi:10.1002/ppp3.10235

Abstract

Societal Impact StatementPlants are our sources of oxygen, food, medicines, clothing, building materials and fuels. They are part of our history, our trade and our imaginations. Here, we investigate the potential for integration of photographs and poetry to bring plants to life and let them tell their stories, inspired by the ancient Japanese woodprint artform, surimono. The resulting ‘photo surimono’ open up new opportunities to engage with the natural world at the juxtaposition of the written and the visual, to combat the cognitive bias of plant blindness and to introduce more connected ways of thinking about plants, people and sustainability into educational programmes.

Highlights

This Brief Report considers the disparate genres of surimono and photopoetry as a basis for a collaboration on plant photography and poetry and its wider implications for visualisation and interpretation of the world around us
The surimono and photopoetry art forms will first be introduced. The integration of these forms as ‘photo surimono’ will be illustrated. This project originated with a series of photographs of flowers taken by one of us (Bob Coe) to which plant biologist Anne Osbourn responded through poetry
It is interesting to note that among the many examples of photopoetry shown by Nott (2018) and by Nicholls and Ling (n.d.), very few have the poem as intimately integrated with the image as is the case in surimono

Summary

Introduction

This Brief Report considers the disparate genres of surimono and photopoetry as a basis for a collaboration on plant photography and poetry and its wider implications for visualisation and interpretation of the world around us. This project originated with a series of photographs of flowers taken by one of us (Bob Coe) to which plant biologist Anne Osbourn responded through poetry. There are many beautiful images of flowers incorporated within surimono prints, as shown in examples from the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Kubo Shunman (1757–1820) (Figure 1).

Results

Conclusion