Thinking with algae

I keep returning to the same question. If algae produce somewhere between seventy and eighty percent of the oxygen we breathe, what is the appropriate posture to adopt in front of them? Gratitude is too sentimental. Documentation is too cold. Something in between — something closer to address — is what the studio has been trying to find.

The pin-hole work began as a deliberately naïve gesture. A tin can, a needle, a hole. The eye of the camera, I kept telling myself, is structurally the same thing as the eye-spot of the algae: a small dark chamber that lets in a measured wedge of light. To build the camera is, in a small way, to build a relative.

What surprised me was how badly the cameras behaved. They leaked. The exposures drifted. The negatives carried more information about the room and about my own hand than they did about the subject. This was, I think, the point. The image was never going to be objective; it was always going to be a record of a meeting.

The lithographs that came out of those negatives are slow in a way that digital files are not. They have a body. They were printed in editions small enough that each one still feels like a single object, and that felt important — the algae is, after all, an organism for whom multiplicity is the basic mode of being.