Other Earthly Company
‘Other Earthly Company’ is an on-going project comprising of several photographs made during walks from 2018-present. Ranging in their topography and geography, they form fragments and observations, mostly of plants, trees and their surrounding environments. Rendered in monochrome, focus is drawn to the transformational way that sunlight can alter a landscape, such as the various tonal variations created by shadow and light upon the ground and the forms that leap to the fore in the absence of colour. Paradoxically, in this sense monochromatic images of the natural world can appear more ‘real’ without colour, as attention is drawn to the myriad shapes they might take in response to the world around them.
As a photographer who never sets out with a particular vision but is instead drawn to or directed by the places they visit, my attention is constantly altered by the inconsistent relationship between sunlight and the natural world. This might, for example, take form in a brief break in cloud cover that suddenly lights up an area of heathland, drawing my attention to a particular tree or shrub that I hadn’t noticed before. Or, during a grey day, might allow an otherwise highly contrasted and densely populated woodland to be seen as it is, a complex, interwoven ecosystem held together by its constituent parts, acting as both independent and/or collaborative organisms.
Over the years of making photographs of and with the places I visit, the connections between humans and the natural world through cultural practices (like walking and taking photographs, for example) has become less abstract and more obvious. Sometimes those relationships are demonstrated visually through obvious human attempts to contain or corral the natural world into a more palatable form; a form supported by a shared cultural view of the natural world as dominated by humans. Philosophers such as Eduardo Coccia and Michael Marder, however, remind us that it is us, in fact, that live in their world, not the other way around. To them, plants provide us with the atmosphere we breathe, a by- product of the relationship shared between vegetal life and the sun, and in doing so demonstrate the true heirs of the earth. This relationship between sunlight and plants, although different in its intentions, carries over its metaphors to the technology of the camera.
Martin Barnes, curator of photography at the Victoria and Albert Museum, makes this connection himself in the publication Into the Woods: Trees in Photography, by drawing attention to both the vegetal world and photography’s “co-reliance on light”. Photography in this sense is a shared experience; one between myself, the sun, and the plants that become my subjects. This experience is then extrapolated once shared to those around me, and forms a series of cultural connections that develop into their own kind of ecosystem. It is in this sense that culture can metaphorically mirror the natural world in its ability to co-exist and to produce new forms of co-operation. Photography, as a visual medium, can take part in this practice by attempting to make it visible, or at the very least to try and illustrate it.
Other Earthly Company is in part an experiment in this union. To explore how photographs might, if read this way, demonstrate how plants and trees share the world with us. Despite our best efforts to control them, cut them back, and shape their borders and canopies, plants always find ways to push back and resist our methods of containment. Although they may not share our human forms of communication or intelligence, they nevertheless act. And in their actions there is something to learn.
To imagine plants as our companions, rather than just our sources for food, shelter or medicine, might be thought of as trite, but in a world that is suffering during a time of climate emergency, and with many of our politicians and global leaders resistant to change or action, it feels almost as if it is a revolutionary act. Although subtle, the plants and places overleaf attempt to encourage such revolutionary thinking, not just in relation to overt visible shifts in the climate, but also in the every day.
