10.6092/issn.2038-3460/18591
application/pdf
2038-3460
18591
2
en
Camilo Castillo
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Damian Hughes, Picturing Ecology: Photography and the Birth of a New Science, Palgrave Macmillan, 2022
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
14
Book Reviews
2024-01-16
2023-12-06
2024-01-16
2024-01-16
115-119
TS
Camilo Castillo
2023
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/18591
115
National University of Colombia
2038-3460
2
en
119
Damian Hughes, Picturing Ecology: Photography and the Birth of a New Science, Palgrave Macmillan, 2022
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/18591/17029
14
T/S                                                                                BOOK REVIEWS



Picturing Ecology: Photography and the Birth of a New Science
by Damian Hughes (2022) Singapore, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 491.




Camilo Castillo
National University of Colombia


   Worldwide known personalities like David Attenborough made wildlife documentaries
one of the main media to visualize more than human life through the mediation of photogra-
phy, TV networks and storytelling. Among some researchers, the progressive unfolding of
these visual media has given rise to what Jim Igoe (2017) calls “nature of spectacle”, where
entertainment, environmental policy and consumerism have found a merging point. How-
ever, wildlife documentalists were transforming a visual sensitivity inherited from the pio-
neers of ecology and photography in Britain. These pioneers were trying to create a new view
of science and life diversity since the late nineteenth century that remains influential to our
current days. In his most recent book Picturing Ecology: Photography and the birth of a new
science, Damien Hughes invites us to witness the work of those early ecologists that shaped
the underpinnings of their discipline as a visual science. Throughout its more than 400 pages,
the author, a seasoned field ecologist and photohistorian with decades of experience, develops
what he conceives as a “visual perspective” to show us how photography mediated the em-
bodied encounters of ecologists with plants to configure the knowledge objects of one of the
most influential sciences of the twentieth century.
   Consisting of seven chapters, the book slowly unfolds a composite picture of ecology’s
history that Hughes elaborated for his readers. The first four chapters set the theoretical and
historical grounds that help to situate one of the most important arguments of the author:
the strong visual basis of early ecologists’ practices that facilitated their task of configuring
“vegetation” as their central knowledge object. The last three chapters take this point further
by paying close attention to the uses of photography in the practices of field ecology, and how
photography served as a platform to negotiate common understandings of knowledge objects
in ecology. The book is based on visual and textual sources that included notebooks, journals,
correspondence, photographs, and publications from early botanists in the United Kingdom
and Europe from 1870 to the early twentieth century. According to Hughes, previous work
addressing the role of images and representations in science (Amann and Knorr-Cetina 1988;
Coopmans et al. 2014; Daston and Galison 1992; Lynch and Woolgar 1990) assumes that
the aim of scientific representation is to “render the invisible visible” (p. 9). For Hughes, that
means a selective approach that emphasizes the use of extraordinary images at the expense of

C
TE NOSCIENZA. tI alian Journal of Scienc & echnoT logy tS udies   © The Author(s) 2023
  14(2) p. 195- ISN 2038-46                                       Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
       DOI: 10.692/issn/1859.203-46                               www.tecnoscienza.net
Castillo                                                                                      116

historical and scientific context. That is why for him the book seeks to articulate a different
perspective that highlights the agency of photographic practices and their role configuring
knowledge-claims and objects in the social practices of science.
   From the very beginning in Chapter 1, the author quickly distances himself from any es-
sentialist and realist account of photography. This helps him to problematize the common-
place assumption that photography’s function in sciences is the progressive unveiling of an
objective and transparent record of natural phenomena, like vegetation in the case of ecology.
The author’s aim is not to engage with that kind of assumptions to criticize them, he rightly
does not take that direction, because his efforts are devoted into situating a different depar-
ture point to study the role of photography in the practices of early ecologists. This is what
enables him to delineate a route for his analysis of the social and epistemological agency of
photography in the following chapters. Once paved that way, Hughes can more easily con-
sider the status of photography in ecology as negotiated and contingent. This basically means
that photography can raise questions concerned with the formation of disciplines, research
agendas and as a rhetorical space for negotiating knowledge objects and evidence.
   In this regard, Chapter 2 draws the contours of a visual history for ecology. Taking us back
to Alexander’s von Humboldt expedition in South America in the early nineteenth century
and the first vegetation surveys by British ecologists in the 1890s, Hughes advances his visual
analysis for understanding the origins of ecology. As a discipline, it was commonly associated
to the scientific study and investigation of “vegetation” in the twentieth century. However,
that definition works better on paper than in practice and history. Following Hughes’ ac-
count, the systematic study of vegetation required in the first place to configure vegetation
as a knowledge object. This would be achieved through the different pictorial strategies by
Humboldt and other early ecologists, who were trying to understand plants en masse and
their associations instead of focusing exclusively on individual species as it was typical of bot-
any at that time. The challenge for these pioneers was to turn their field experiences observing
plants in the field into compelling evidence informing “vegetation” as a new scientific object.
For doing so, they translated their field observations into textual descriptions including dif-
ferent factors considered as important to study vegetation, like for example botanical and
physical information. But crucially, it was also important for these scientists to include visual
information, which helped them to understand and study vegetation as an eminently visual
knowledge object. This represented, according to Hughes, one of the milestones in the disci-
plinary transition between nineteenth century botany and twentieth century ecology: from
the study of isolated species to the study of plant communities by means such as handmade
illustrations, photographs, and maps.
   These points are stressed in Chapter 3, the longest one, where Hughes examines the con-
tribution of visual practices in developing a scientific community of ecologists. Ecology pio-
neers like Robert Smith and Arthur Tansley considered it important to develop visual field
methods to communicate the basic concepts and legitimacy of vegetation as an object for
scientific study. In my opinion, in this chapter Hughes combines in an exemplary way his
historical sources with a sophisticated analysis of the social life of photography in the consti-
tution of ecology as a new science. This is without any doubt one of the biggest contributions
of the book: a broad and refined understanding of visual practices that can be used in differ-
117                                                                     Tecnoscienza. 2023. 14(2)

ent ways for studying the historical trajectories of sciences. As Hughes analyzes it, ecologists
exchanged, collected and transformed photos depending on their use and circulation. For
example, photos were used to illustrate lectures and communicate ecological concepts, but
also to share experiences of field-collecting in presentations, or to document methods used
in studies and broadly to create the occasions among ecologists for thinking, discussing, and
contesting knowledge about vegetation. In one of the most interesting passages in the book,
Hughes shows how photography was important in the excursions of scientific associations
to document their activities, which helped botanists participating in these excursions to start
seeing themselves as ecologists (p. 155).
   But not everything in the study of vegetation was straightforward, and photography was
not a panacea to unveil vegetation and make it a knowledge object. According to Hughes,
many botanists would resist the view of studying vegetation in favor of species studies by the
late nineteenth century (p. 197). So, rather than representations of vegetation, photographs
were, following Hughes, the means for ecologists to talk and discuss about their studies of
plant associations, so they were not used at face value as direct representations of vegetation.
That’s what Hughes argues in Chapter 4, where he emphasizes the special devotion of ecol-
ogists in developing their visual practices. Print publication would be the preferred visual
medium for ecologists to communicate their approach to understanding vegetation and plant
associations, especially by creating new journals and textbooks. Interestingly, as Hughes’ his-
torical analysis shows, the photographic efforts of ecologists did not rely on a unified under-
standing of how to translate vegetation into pictures. For that reason, the main significance of
photography for ecologists at that time was to show ecological work in action. It is, as made in
the field through the direct study of plants growing together as a complex phenomenon that
deserved scientific attention by visual means.
   Maintaining its historical orientation, Chapter 5 delves into the practicalities through which
“the field” as the privileged place of knowledge production for ecologists was configured. This
is perhaps the chapter that could be more interesting for STS readers looking for new directions
in the study of images in scientific practices. Rather than focusing on photographs as devices
for creating more convincing and persuasive scientific representations of vegetation, Hughes
contributes to opening other analytical concerns that investigate the subjective and embodied
foundations of ecological knowledge through photography. Taking the case of the use of maps
and cameras in early twentieth-century ecology, the author analyses how the knowledge objects
of ecology were negotiated through the body movements and observations of field ecologists
studying vegetation. In that way, maps and photographs were configured as “prosthetic tech-
nologies of affect” (p. 286), which following the author, could record the embodied experienc-
es of ecologists surveying vegetation. This activity basically consisted of choosing and going to
a place “in the field” and judging which aspects of its vegetation deserved to be observed and
recorded. In short, maps and cameras were central for ecologists to negotiate their embodied
activities when observing plants. The use of these artefacts helped ecologists to configure what
Hughes calls a “shared visual cognition” (p. 303) which was practiced in the field and facilitated
ecologists’ aspiration to reach a common understanding of vegetation’s nature.
   However, this shared visual cognition was shaped by the very material practices of Victorian
and Edwardian natural history in which the act of collecting objects, in this case specimens, was
Castillo                                                                                       118

considered synonymous with knowledge acquisition according to Hughes. In relation to this
context, Chapter 6 explores the common practices of photographic exchanges between ecolo-
gists, in which they shared similar assumptions of photographs’ capacities for structuring and
communicating ecological knowledge. This chapter is a bit more ambitious because the author
argues that not only for ecology but also for natural history, the mediation of photography was
common in its role of expressing the embodied experience carried out in fieldwork practices.
So, photography besides being used as a visual witnessing tool to share with others what was
seen in the field, was used as well to attest the bodily and affective experience of being “in the
field”. One of the examples provided in the book is the work of Arthur Tansley in the 1930s,
whose field practices of notetaking, photography and cartographic sketching were informed by
a particular way of walking and working in the field. In this case, according to Hughes, photo-
graphs functioned first, as evidence for the ecological knowledge object and second, as a surro-
gate for the sensory registration of seeing a woodland plant community. In short, photography
was both the expression and vehicle for the embodied knowledge-making practices of ecology.
   Picturing Ecology demonstrates the importance and value of archive-led research and the po-
tential of photographic history as a tool to study the formation of scientific discourses and prac-
tices. It represents a new appreciation of archival work and photographic repositories contribu-
tion to a visual history of ecology, just like Susan Leigh Star and James Griesemer (1989) did it
in the past studying animal repositories and their role for research in natural history museums.
Hughes offers us a rich historical study which besides making a visual history of ecology, serves
as a guide to anyone interested in analyzing the role played by photography in the history of
sciences. The book may be useful for anyone in STS wishing to understand the histories, visual
cultures and ordinary practices that have shaped the use of photographs in scientific practices.
   For some STS readers, Hughes’ approach is close to ontological approaches founded on the
practical analysis of how the reality of entities, like for example vegetation, is sustained by the
activities of people, technologies and other than humans. However, Hughes seems to reduce
ontological reflections to discussions about what photography and photographs actually are
(pp.14, 36, 287, 422). In my opinion, this is a limitation imposed by the static way that ontol-
ogy is often understood in photography studies and that could prevent dialogues with many
of the ontologically inflected STS contributions that are absent in the book. For some in
STS (Ashmore 2005; Mol 2002; Woolgar and Lezaun 2013), ontology refers to the practical
and sociomaterial arrangements that sustain and make possible the maintenance of knowl-
edge and scientific objects. For that reason, I think it becomes necessary in future research
to develop the conceptual nuances able to connect the historical and cultural importance of
photography in the sciences, as argued by Hughes, with an STS ontological understanding of
photography where what counts both as images and the possibilities of their use are shaped
in practical action. This book will certainly inspire future works in that direction, since it
brilliantly opens the doors for further studies that for example could analyze the visual and
embodied basis of contemporary ecology, especially in the era of remote sensing, where huge
volumes of data and their visualization in maps has contributed to our understanding, sense
of action and agency in an epoch of pressing and existential ecological issues for life on earth.
119                                                                           Tecnoscienza. 2023. 14(2)

References

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   11(2), pp. 133-169.
Ashmore, Malcolm (2005) The Life Inside/The Left-Hand Side, in “Social Studies of Science”, 35(5),
   pp. 827-830.
Coopmans, Catelijne, Vertesi, Janet, Lynch, Michael and Woolgar, Steve (eds.) (2014) Representation in
   Scientific Practice Revisited, Cambridge (MA), The MIT Press.
Daston, Lorraine and Galison, Peter (1992) The Image of Objectivity, in “Representations”, 40, pp. 81-128.
Igoe, Jim (2017) The nature of spectacle: On images, money, and conserving capitalism, Tucson,
   University of Arizona Press.
Lynch, Michael and Woolgar, Steve (eds.) (1990) Representation in scientific practice (1st ed.), Cambridge
   (MA), The MIT Press.
Mol, Annemarie (2002) The body multiple: Ontology in medical practice, Durham, Duke University Press.
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Woolgar, Steve and Lezaun, Javier (2013) The wrong bin bag: A turn to ontology in science and technology
   studies?, in “Social Studies of Science”, 43(3), pp. 321-340.
