Lux Mundi:
Peter Shellenberger’s Photosynthesis

Kenneth White

The flower glows. A lithe stem erupts in stalks that cluster and spread. At their edge, prickling bunches reach further still; their tips open to small, crisp petals. The tonal range of the image is extreme. The petals define the flower’s cast of brilliant white amid depthless black. Over the flower a milky spheroid levitates—part lens flare, part halo of lead. Yet the flower achieves a luminosity greater than the source of its visibility, as if the illumination is intrinsic to the stalks, the petals. And in that light—more modest bare-bulb than mythic Helios— variable lux is a function of distance, we can surmise. An indistinct burst in our line of sight defines the flower in-between. The flower absorbs and intensifies the light: by structure and by luminosity—inflorescence to phosphorescence—the flower radiates, a backyard mushroom cloud.

The image presents two bursts: one vegetal, one energetic. And each makes a bid against time. We confront not a candid snapshot of life caught unawares, not a romantic affirmation of instantaneous exposure, but instead a sustained agreement, a pact even, drawn up between alert subject and patient image-maker, between chlorophyll and colloid. Light and dark do not resolve in a decisive moment of pathos—eternity in an instant—but light and dark converges. It is an impression that hails from an earlier era, indeed from the dawn of photography. This flower, not so much captured but rather fused into towering solidity, declares its genealogy in the work of Henry Fox Talbot and his “photogenic drawings” of Botanical specimens (1835). The operational logic of the image is a simple one: a photograph of flowers at night, in the dark, exposed under a light bulb. But the control required, and displayed, is extraordinary, almost excessive. The operation renders the flowers almost animate, alert: not so much a photograph of flowers as a conspiracy between flower and photographer. The flower closes distance as its herbaceous logic defines a trajectory to an eclipse on a stem. The forces at work: light makes the plant as light makes the image. The flower halts time to the measure of its picture for an instant in eternity. The fossil glows.

Daucus carota, common name wild carrot or Queen Anne’s Lace: such grandeur for a plant growing anywhere and so wanted nowhere, a denigrated trash weed. But the descriptive proper noun belies a natural present-perfect conditional: if Peter Shellenberger calls this series of photographs Queen Anne’s Lace, their subject is light. Where in the first image the flower is centered in fine clarity, though weighted with its lead halo, then in the second image our view rises and the light source enters the frame. Brightness obscures definition, and troubles the surety of our position: flowers seem to rise up for their illumination. We see a scrim of grass in mottled depth; even in the monochrome, the grays are so sumptuous they give green. In a third image, orb light now defined, yet compositional illusion created by high- key light source suggests a correlative direction between the light and the flower stems: an optical experiment in alternative causation not so much imbuing the Queen Anne’s Lace with animate determination, but rather keeping company with the possibilities of nature aided by the technologies of photographic media. No sunrise here: rather a lightbulb on a stick.

In another image, the light source appears as the figure-object of the composition, a lord with a coterie of queens. The darkness thickens, becomes almost palpable, a dark gum diluted only at the visible gutter in legs of New England terroir. Secondary flares and shorter stems share tones of graphite. In other images, our view is more immersed in the Queen Anne’s Lace. We go to ground, if not into the severed ear discovered by a Jeffrey Beaumont “in a field behind our neighborhood,” then perhaps something more affirmative yet no less portentous: the photographs make continuous the flowers and the darkness. Recall that Queen Anne’s Lace is well-known for its homeopathic application an implantation inhibitor in fertility management. Not until 1965, in the ruling by the United States Supreme Court inGriswold v. Connecticut, would married couples be granted a constitutional right to privacy—a “penumbra” of privacy—in their purchase of contraceptives. We are close, close enough for happy comfort, even close enough to catch a scent of carrot. Such is the quality of immediacy in Shellenberger’s work that exceeds distinctions of analog and digital in resplendent prints.

In 2016, the genome of Daucus carota was sequenced at the United States Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in Berkeley, California. The Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory was founded in 1931 by Ernest Lawrence as the Radiation Laboratory, or Rad Lab. An early member of the Rad Lab was J. Robert Oppenheimer, “father of the atomic bomb.” Daucus carota exists in two and a half gigabytes of open access digital files. The common makes way for the inscrutable.

“‘Would it surprise you to be told,’ he said darkly, ‘that the Atomic Theory is at work in this parish?’” So queries Sergeant Pluck to the unnamed narrator of Flann O’Brien’s novel The Third Policeman. “‘It would indeed,’” the narrator replies. “‘The Atomic Theory,’ I sallied, ‘is a thing that is not clear to me at all.’” The Sergeant returns that Michael Gilhaney, a local citizen in this parish of rural Ireland, “‘is an example of a man that is nearly banjaxed from the principle of the Atomic Theory. Would it astonish you to hear,” the Sergeant asks the narrator—asks us—“‘that he is nearly half a bicycle?”1 The Third Policeman figures large in Shellenberger’s imagination, inspired in part by “de Selby,” a mysterious genius to whose work the unnamed narrator has devoted his life. De Selby is the absent yet integral core of the novel: he is the motive force to the narrative and a discursive conceit for O’Brien’s brilliant humor. The narrator, abetted by O’Brien, devotes substantial passages to de Selby’s projects and his interlocutors, including reference to secondary literature authored by one “Bassett” entitled Lux Mundi, light of the world.2

The Maine Yankee Atomic Power Company Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installation may be found on Old Ferry Road in Wiscasset, Maine. Google Maps street view presents composite images along the road. Clicking through the proprietary navigation tool results in a blurred shift from summer to fall, never winter. The seasons change by distance. You can almost taste the carrots on the wind. “So far, one may say, so good.”3 So then we may understand, and celebrate, Peter Shellenberger’s photosynthesis.

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1 Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman (1967) Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, Milner Library, Illinois State University, 1999), 83.

2 O’Brien, 51, footnote 4.

3 O’Brien, 64.