In Seeds, the Dutch documentary photographer Jos Jansen examines how new food crops are developed and how that process bears upon the world food problem. The book is about Darwin’s natural selection and how it has long been overtaken by high-tech plant breeding, which in essence accelerates evolution. Jansen conceived the book, made the photographs, and wrote its texts; the philosopher Bas Haring also contributes an essay, which asks: “Why would natural things – plants and animals – be better for us than unnatural or ‘less natural’ things?” Rob van Hoesel edited and designed the volume for The Eriskay Connection, which published it in 2014 as an English-language classic hardcover of 112 pages, measuring 292 by 245 millimeters.
The focus is plant breeding rather than agriculture as scenery. To select a plant resistant to insect plagues in Africa or droughts in China, literally thousands of plants first have to be made sick, until eventually one healthy plant remains with just the tiny bit of DNA that allows it to be the sole survivor — the chosen one. Over many years and in numerous repetitive cycles, crops are crossed, bred, tested, and selected again and again to reach that specific goal. Jansen’s photographs stay inside the resulting questions rather than resolving them: Who is actually in charge on this planet? Nature? Human beings? A god?
The stakes are public ones, concerning future food supply and where any line between acceptable and unacceptable, natural and unnatural, might fall. The book asks whether humans should stop interfering with evolution and return to the authenticity of small-scale farms and city farming, or whether it is humanity’s duty to steer evolution so that enough food can be created to feed the booming world population. Haring’s essay gives the pictures a philosophical counterpart rather than a caption.
For a collector, the appeal lies in a documentary practice taking on industrial biology and in the collaboration among photographer, editor, designer, and philosopher that the publisher credits. It is a considered object from a small press, and its subject has not stopped mattering since 2014.
