Seeing Through the Eyes of Plants

To understand, empathize with, and “become-with” other species, we need to see the world through their eyes. We might imagine ourselves looking at the world through the eyes of a leopard, a gazelle, or a frog, but what would it mean to look at the world through the eyes of a plant? Imagining this is challenging because people often fail even to see plants; we first need to acknowledge the existence of plants and our dependence on them before we can begin to understand how they see. In this chapter, we illustrate how we use a range of photographic techniques combined with creative visualizations of scientific data to explore two aspects of plant “vision.” Plants perceive (“see”) much more of the radiant spectrum than people do, and they use this radiation to eat (photosynthesis) and breathe (photorespiration). Plants also experience time differently from us. Their lifespans vary from minutes to millennia. In becoming-with plants, we need to step outside the decades-to-century lifespan that frames many of our interactions with the world. We suggest that seeing in plant time can unify Michael Marder’s three interpretations of plant temporality: cyclic temporality of iteration, repetition, and reproduction; seasonal changes; and the apparent infinite temporality of plant growth engendered by iteration and repetition. Our analysis and juxtaposition of plant vision and time points toward an hermeneutics of plant vision that could be used to see into the being of a plant’s leaves.