It takes a lot of energy to perceive the world, and evolution favors energy efficiency. As a result, the human brain does a terrific job of learning to filter things out. We lose the details of our surroundings as they grow familiar, moving through life in a state of near-automatism, recognizing objects and concepts — “clothes, furniture, one’s wife, the fear of war,” as Viktor Shklovsky puts it in “Art as Technique” — without truly seeing them. In that 1917 text, the Russian critic famously argued that art’s purpose was to recover these things, “to make the stone stony.” More recently, a wave of scholars and artists have recognized that the stone needs to be stony as never before: As we’ve become habituated to the ravages of industrialism, this automatic anthropocentric march forward has plunged the world deeper into climate catastrophe. Academic approaches like “object-oriented ontology” and “the vegetal turn” seek to reorient our perception of reality so that nature comes back into focus.
One frontier of this battle has been tackling “plant blindness,” or the post-industrial tendency to disregard plant life to the point of its invisibility. (Where the names, types, and uses of plants were once common knowledge, now they dissolve into an amorphous green backdrop.) The book Science/Fiction: A Non-History of Plants (2025) and its accompanying exhibition, which opened at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris and travels to the Foto Arsenal Wein in October, is part of this broader push to recenter the botanical.
Written by Felix Hoffmann, Simon Baker, Giovanni Aloi, Natsumi Tanaka, and Michael Marder and edited by Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Victoria Aresheva, and Clothilde Morette, Science/Fiction weaves an eclectic photo history of plants from the 19th century to the present, moving non-chronologically between works like Anna Atkins’s “Asplenium angustifolium” — one of her iconic 1850s cyanotypes of ferns— and Stan Brakhage’s 1981 film “Garden of Earthly Delights,” in which the filmmaker adhered plants directly to transparent motion picture celluloid. It not only questions the boundaries between human and nature, but also seeks to break down the dividing line between art and science, giving equal weight to Laure Albin-Guillot’s 1930s breakthroughs in photomicrography (which Albin-Guillot herself labelled as “decorative”) and contemporary pieces by Sam Falls, who composes and captures indexical impressions of plants on canvas and ceramics. As an object, the book ties these disparate pieces together well, drawing out unexpected visual kinships between work from different contexts.
Like many attempts to reconsider the art historical canon these days, Science/Fiction employs a thematic structure. One downfall of this non-historical method is that it at times overstates the newness of plants as a major force in science fiction; the killer plant subgenre is at least as old as Anna Atkins, and certainly more overlooked. Likewise, it underemphasizes the 19th-century amateur botany craze that catalyzed Atkins’s work. Aristocratic scholar-inventors like William Henry Fox Talbot developed new visual tools (like photography!) in part to catalogue their ever-expanding colonial Wunderkammers, indirectly leading to the very technologies that enable our modern ways of seeing. That century’s European lust for exotic plants is perhaps the inverse of today’s plant blindness, and it birthed a vibrant tradition of gothic plant sci-fi that likewise blurred the boundaries between human and vegetal to uncanny effect. Far from passive wallflowers, these imagined plants were agents of often terrifying, all-consuming will, gobbling up botanists and shielding their native lands.
At the same time, by forgoing chronology and disciplinary frameworks, Science/Fiction embraces fiction’s ability to grasp the incomprehensible. How does one picture a way through catastrophe otherwise? Rather than a conquest of facts or a collection of specimens, the book builds a botanical daydream. This is not a bad thing — when it comes to surviving the Anthropocene, we need a little more imagination, and dreaming can be urgent work.
Science/Fiction: A Non-History of Plants (2025), written by Felix Hoffmann, Simon Baker, Giovanni Aloi, Natsumi Tanaka, and Michael Marder; edited by Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Victoria Aresheva, and Clothilde Morette; and published by Spector Books, is available for pre-order online. The book will be available for purchase on April 29.
