“These creatures are coming from the future. An imagined future caught between memory and projection, and based on current research regarding synthetic biology,” explains photographer Vincent Fournier, of his new publication Post Natural History.
At first glance, the book is simply a collection of beautiful photography in the style of natural history documentation, but hidden in Fournier’s images of insects and jellyfish are a series of genetic quirks – the glass body of a dragonfly, adapted to detect volatile inorganics, the strands of a jellyfish, able to function as a data transmitter, and the colour-adaptive scales of a climate-tolerant pangolin.
“The viewer is not certain whether these species are real or not, or even when and how they were made” Fournier explains, “to me it is important that the species themselves are objects of beauty, with the reasoning of the transformation being uncertain.”
The book borrows from the style of traditional scientific illustrations, but portrays creatures taken from an unspecified point in the future, when genetic modification has played a hand in evolution, evoking an unsettled feeling that these creatures are at once real and unreal.
“These living species have been re-programmed by mankind to better fit our environment, as well as to adapt to human desires,” Fournier says, “it’s important to me that my stories are based on science, so that they can potentially be true. I like to play with the idea of a true/false archive, like in some Jorge Louis Borges novels, with several levels of reality.”
As well as borrowing from the displaced reality of Borges stories, Fournier turned to the Muséum National d’Histoires Naturelles in Paris, in particular, for real-life inspiration. He met with a synthetic biologist to explore the ways species could evolve in line with our current technology and changing environment, ensuring that all his modified species retained a tentative basis in reality.
“I was interested in the idea of exaggerating the present in order to create speculative fiction,” he says, “these hybrid creatures are also inspired from the refined and particular style of the encyclopedic board.”
Fournier describes science as a ‘link between the visible and invisible world’, and it’s this link he’s teased out in his Post Natural History project. The creatures function as a bridge between the world of imagination and the complex possibilities of genetic manipulation.
“I found in science the material to imagine possible fictions and generate a collective psyche. It is the imaginary and dream side of science that I am interested in, its fictional and extraordinary potential.”
