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.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The desire for a plant photographic subjectivity was by no means exhausted by the fanciful responses to Wager’s work. As recently as October 2019 researchers at London Zoo’s Rainforest Life exhibit could claim – however ironically – that a plant they call Pete had taken a “selfie”. The declared objective of their experiment was to harness the power of microbial fuel cells to power cameras in ecological settings for conservation research. This project was largely successful, but the plant – a maidenhead fern – also seemed to be taking selfies of itself once every twenty seconds.

2. “We could say that in biology we’re still in a period which we could define as Aristotelian-Ptolemaic. Before the Copernican Revolution, people still believed that Earth was at the centre of the universe and that all celestial bodies revolved around it – a totally anthropocentric vision which Galileo endeavoured to subvert and which took centuries to disappear from popular opinion. Well, we could say that biology finds itself in a more or less pre-Copernican situation. The reigning idea is that humans are the most important living beings and everything revolves around us: because we’ve imposed ourselves upon the others we’re the absolute lords of nature. An intriguing and consoling vision … if only it were true!” Mancuso 2015, 39–40. For another genial statement of the botanic Copernican Revolution see Pollin, The Botany of Desire.

3. The changes across the two editions of Chamovitz’s book testify to the tremendous changes being carried through in this field of study.

4. See the pioneering studies by Marder, Plant Thinking, Coccia, The Life of Plants and Nealon, Plant Theory.

5. “Darwin showed that plants were able to perceive a stimulus, which then caused a different part of the plant to react with a specific and clearly adaptive way. The parallel with animals was clear to Darwin … The seed of the idea that plants can think had been sown.” Thompson, Darwin’s Most Wonderful Plants, 76.

6. Nature, December 21, 1929, 954.

7. Wager, “The Action of Light on Chlorophyll,” 386.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid.

16. “The interest aroused by the contention made by Francis Darwin, so of the uthor of the ‘The Origin of Species’ in his presidential address before the British Association in Dublin last week, that plants can remember and can develop habits, has been increased by a paper read today by Prof Harold Wager, the well known botanist. Prof Wager declared that plants possess an organism corresponding to the brain in animals and further demonstrated that they have eyes with which they can see and see well.” New York Times, September 8, 1908.

17. “These lenses are so good and focus the light that falls on them so carefully that photographs can be taken by means of them. Prof. Wager has taken a great many such photographs, and he showed some of the most remarkable. These included reproducitons of a photograph of Darwin, in which the features were distinct and unmistakeable, as well as direct photographs of landscapes and people. Even coloured photographs were exhibited and, like the rest, they are remarkably clearly defined.” New York Times, September 8, 1908.

18. For a review of the significance of Haberlandt’s work, especially his pioneering techniques in microscopy that would been of interest to Wafger, see Laimer & Ruecker, 2003.

19. Wager, 459.

20. Wager notes that Haberlandt saw clear and distinct images through the cell lenses and also obtained “a somewhat indistinct photograph of a microscope stand” (Wager 1908, 262; but if Haberlandt could claim priority for the first plant cell lens photograph, Wager developed and extended the technique.

21. Wager, 462.

22. Ibid., 464.

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid., 478.

25. Ibid., 481.

26. Ibid., 488.

27. Ibid.

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid., 489.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid.

32. Ibid., 289.

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Notes on contributors

Howard Caygill

Howard Caygill is Professor of Modern European Philosophy in the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University. His most recent book is Force and Understanding: Writings on Philosophy and Resistance (2020).