Photographic Phytography: Towards a Photographic Re-Centring of the Oak Tree within Theory, Material and Practice

Abstract

This paper explores my practice-based research project Arboreal Encounters, a collection of tannin toned cyanotypes made with six heritage oak trees that form an element of my part-time, practice-based Ph.D. at the University of Brighton, UK. It comprises a brief history and background of the project before exploring how photographic practice might interact with and integrate notions of vegetal intelligence within artistic practice. By thinking of the production of Arboreal Encounters as if an invitation to the trees to become part of the process of their own representation, I consider how such interactions might act symbolically as human-plant collaborations and how methods of thinking, as well as doing, may resist notions of the plant as commodity within artistic practice.