Artist Blog

Every week an artist whose single image was published by Der Greif is given a platform in which to blog about contemporary photography.

In February I had a show in Helsinki (www.hippolyte.fi). The weather this time of the year is often cloudy and days are still quite short. This year there hasn’t been too much snow which makes the season even darker. When I started to plan the show, I thought it would be nice to transform the exhibition space so that it was the opposite of the depressing winter weather outdoors. To accomplish this, I used Fuchsia seedlings and LED lights Green plants have different responses to different wavebands of sunlight. I contacted biologist Pedro Aphalo at the University of Helsinki; he and his colleagues Titta Kotilainen and Sari Siipola introduced me to the basics of photobiology. In the exhibition space I set an experiment with seedlings of Fuchsia gotenborg and three different light treatments: one set of plants exposed to white light, another to blue and red light, and third to white and far red light. The aim of the installation was to show how the quality and quantity of sunlight determine the shape and color of a plant in a similar way that light determines what becomes visible in a photograph. In other words, in a photograph the nature of the light determines what is visible in a picture and how. In this same way, the nature of sunlight determines the visual appearance of plants.