Plants have long served as screens for human projection, and this book takes that condition seriously. Edited by Victoria Aresheva and Clothilde Morette with the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Science/Fiction: A Non-History of Plants assembles photographic and filmic images spanning the mid-nineteenth century to the present, drawn from more than thirty artists working across different periods and places. The visual record moves between scientific discovery and animist belief, between anxiety about genetic modification and political narrative, tracking how thoroughly the vegetal world has absorbed our desires and fears.
The book’s method is its argument: it refuses chronology. Instead it organizes its material around two poles, science and fiction, and proceeds with the logic of a science-fiction novel—beginning in a recognizable world before gradually unsettling it. Essays by Felix Hoffmann, Simon Baker, Giovanni Aloi, Natsumi Tanaka and Michael Marder accompany the images, and Natasha Agapova’s design shapes the sequence. The result is a sustained dialogue between rational knowledge and symbolic imagination, in which plants appear as sentient beings, silent observers, or political allies.
The plants here are not backdrop but subject, and the book locates them at the intersection of ecological crisis, biotechnology, and shifting definitions of the natural and the artificial. That framework gives the volume its reach: it is less a survey of botanical photography than an inquiry into how images have constructed the vegetal, and what those constructions reveal about broader social transformations and collective anxieties.
The catalogue records Spector Books’ 2025 second English edition. The publication received the 2025/26 German Photobook Prize exhibition-category gold medal; the organiser does not specify the printing. For collectors engaged with photography’s entanglement with science and its fictions, or with contemporary thinking about plants, the book’s interdisciplinary range and the relation between images, essays and the book’s non-chronological structure offers concrete material for comparing how different disciplines represent the same living world.
