Karel Doing’s article proposes the phytogram — an image made by combining the internal chemistry of plants directly with photographic emulsion — as both a technical practice and a theoretical provocation. Drawing on structural/materialist film theory, biosemiotics, and perspectivism, Doing argues that conventional cinema is fundamentally a human-centred apparatus: its lens, frame ratio, and projection speed are calibrated to reproduce human perception, and in doing so, they produce a feedback loop that naturalizes that perception as reality itself. The phytogram breaks this loop. When a plant’s own chemistry becomes the agent of image-making, the resulting image is not a representation of the world as seen through human eyes but a trace of a process that exceeds human authorship — the image, Doing writes, “moves by itself.” He situates this practice within a lineage running from Anna Atkins’ 1843 cyanotypes of British algae through Moholy-Nagy’s photograms, tracing how each generation has rediscovered the artistic and epistemological potential of letting plant matter act on light-sensitive surfaces. What distinguishes Doing’s framework is its insistence on the political stakes of this practice: phytography is not merely a formal experiment but a way of making visible a broader, more-than-human community of knowledge and experience.
Doing’s article provides the theoretical infrastructure for much of the work collected elsewhere in this dataset. If cinema is, as he argues, a technology built to reproduce human-centred reality — “singularity” in his terms — then the phytogram is a direct challenge to that singularity, a media practice that insists on other agencies, other perceptions, other ways of registering the world. This matters for migration studies because the dominant media forms through which migration is represented — news photography, documentary film, surveillance footage — all operate within precisely the apparatus Doing critiques: human-centred, calibrated for legibility, oriented toward a viewer who is assumed to be a citizen rather than a migrant. The phytogram proposes a different model of media altogether, one in which authorship is distributed, the boundary between organism and apparatus dissolves, and the image carries the chemical memory of a living environment rather than the optical perspective of a human observer. It is a framework for thinking about what it would mean to make media that is accountable to more than the human.
— SG
Original article:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1746847720909348
Further reading:
Atkins A (1843) Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions. Sevenoaks: Anna Atkins.
Botar OAI (2007) The origins of László Moholy-Nagy’s biocentric constructivism. In: Kac E (ed.) Signs of Life, Bioart and Beyond. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 315–344.
Kohn E (2015) How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press.