Seeing Life

One of the persistently difficult questions that comes up in science is how to define life – how to determine if something is living. To most of us, it’s fairly obvious. Plants and animals, including humans, are alive. Rocks, water, and so on, are not.

However, the question gets more complicated for scientists that study things like viruses and other very simple organisms that, although they are organic and interact with other living things, do not have all the characteristics of other life. Nevertheless, they often have DNA and it seems troubling for some reason to not think of them as living.

Regardless of what one thinks about this issue, the initial observation, that it’s obvious to most of us what life looks like, is worth some deeper consideration.

It’s obvious that living things move (even if slowly, like plants and corals), reproduce, feed, and so on. But there often seems to be something different, which is perhaps why definitions that focus on just those things don’t intuitively work.

Some cultures and religions talk about a sort of “life force”, something that is common to plants and animals. And while animals are often considered to be different, there is still this common element that we recognize in both.

I’ve toyed around with trying to explore this concept photographically. Without thinking about it too hard, I wonder what types of pictures best evoke the life in something.

One thing that somehow creates the impression, even if I can’t articulate why, is backlit foliage. Examples include both leaves and flowers.

For some reason, this illustrates for me that something is alive, even if the physical mechanism is similar to, say, stained glass windows. And even though this clearly doesn’t apply to more opaque lifeforms like dogs and people.

The fact that it doesn’t apply to all life forms is interesting, and makes me wonder if it’s illustrating something more primitive or fundamental, or if it’s just an illustration of it being far off base.

Another possibility is that this is just a subconscious representation of having run across the “life force” idea many times, but I suspect there’s more. I can’t put my finger on why just yet, and hope that continuing to explore this artistically will help me understand what that “more” might be.