Todd R. Forsgren

Ex. Ex. Colonies 

The United States Navy’s U.S. South Seas Exploring Expedition (called the Ex. Ex. for short) was an ambitious four-year trip around the world from 1838-1842. It included six ships and amidst the crew were a team of nine scientists and artists. The thousands of articles collected (from ethnographic artifacts to biological specimens) became the foundation of the Smithsonian Institution’s collections.

Right around this time, in Great Britain, botanist and photographer Anna Atkins was experimenting with a new photographic technology called cyanotype. This technique uses ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide to create blue images. Atkins laid algal specimens directly onto paper coated with these chemicals and then exposed them to sunlight. The resulting images were used to make the first photographic book: Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843).

Among the specimens gathered during the Ex. Ex. were numerous stony corals, many of which were the first of their species to be described by science. Due to the technological constraints of the time, it would’ve been difficult to make meaningful cyanotypes of these corals, as the process is most successful with relatively flat and somewhat translucent objects (neither of which applies to most stony corals). Fortunately, with today’s technology, this is no longer the case. I had the opportunity to photograph particularly charismatic specimens of coral in the Smithsonian’s Invertebrate Zoology Collection (from the Ex. Ex. as well as later expeditions) and used these images to make this series of cyanotypes.

This series is an imagined historic collision between the Ex. Ex. and Anna Atkins’s work. I created this body of work because of the perils these corals face due to the rise in the temperature and acidity of the oceans, which is driven by climate change. Coral reef bleaching events, where the living coral is abandoned by its symbiotic algae, result in corals with tissues so transparent that all that can be seen is their white skeletons. The frequency and breadth of these events has increased in recent years, resulting in higher rates of coral mortality. Unfortunately, within our lifetimes, it’s possible that all that will be left of stony corals are their skeletons, crumbling in the oceans or on museum shelves.

I hope that these cyanotypes are an aesthetic and conceptual reflection on this: the blue and white prints reminiscent of a reef full of the white coral skeletons. Printing these images as cyanotypes is also significant because the technique was once used by architects to make blueprints. In many ways, stony corals are the “architecture of the oceans.” Ironically, while being invertebrates themselves, corals are the backbone of entire ocean ecosystems. If these reefs perish, many species will be without a home and the effects will resonate across the oceans. This will be felt by human societies around the globe. In economic terms, the value of reefs is immense.

Historically, the Ex. Ex and Atkins represent two crucial moments for the democratization and dispersion of information… The Ex. Ex. was a grand and ambitious voyage of discovery, while Atkins was a persistent individual seeking knowledge. This seems fitting, as both ambitious global coordination as well as thoughtful personal choices are crucially needed if we are to save the world’s coral reefs and oceans.

My title for this series, Ex. Ex. Colonies, pays homage to the U.S. South Seas Exploring Expedition (although most of the coral I photographed were collected on later voyages). Colonies refers to most corals, which are colonial species, living together in groups. But the title is a word play as well. Ex. Ex. also refers to the removal of these species from the environment through human intervention (once by scientists collecting these specific corals and now at a global scale due to climate change). Colonies also references the problematic colonial history that is entwined with the history of museum collecting.