Inspired by surimono: Integrating photography and poetry to bring plants into focus

Plants are our sources of oxygen, food, medicines, clothing, building materials and fuels. They are part of our history, our trade and our imaginations. Here, we investi-gate the potential for integration of photographs and poetry to bring plants to life and let them tell their stories, inspired by the ancient Japanese woodprint artform, surimono. The resulting ‘ photo surimono ’ open up new opportunities to engage with the natural world at the juxtaposition of the written and the visual, to combat the cognitive bias of plant blindness and to introduce more connected ways of thinking about plants, people and sustainability into educational programmes.


| INTRODUCTION
This Brief Report considers the disparate genres of surimono and photopoetry as a basis for a collaboration on plant photography and poetry and its wider implications for visualisation and interpretation of the world around us. The surimono and photopoetry art forms will first be introduced. The integration of these forms as 'photo surimono' will then be illustrated. This project originated with a series of

| SURIMONO
Surimono (literally 'printed thing') originally applied to Japanese woodblock printed material generally, but by the Edo period , the term came to be used for 'limited edition, singlesheet woodblock prints that were distributed as private gifts rather than sold commercially' (Hanaoka & Pollard, 2018). They were often of the highest quality, both in terms of the materials used (paper, inks) and the expertise of the printer. Surimono became very popular in the late 18th to mid-19th century (Siffert, 1996). They were not commercial products but generally privately commissioned by poetry groups. Prints would consist of a poem, or several poems, together with an image; poets or poetry groups would commission an artist to produce an image that resonated with the poems (Kazuhiro, 2005). The poems were on occasion haiku (17 syllables in lines of 5, 7 and 5 syllables) but in later works were usually in kyoka style, sometimes translated as 'mad' or 'crazy' poetry. Kyoka are five-line poems with the format of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables (Yamaguchi, n.d.). Hanaoka and Pollard (2018) state that kyoka poets aimed to challenge poetic traditions and subvert the classical poetry form, while demonstrating their own skills, wit and knowledge. Popular woodblock prints (ukiyo-e) often ran into several thousand copies, but surimono, being privately commissioned, were printed in much smaller numbers-sometimes just 50 or so. The artists commissioned to produce the image for the sheet were usually well-known professionals, including Katsushika Hokusai, who was 'a brilliant innovator in surimono' (Kazuhiro, 2005). Hanaoka and Pollard (2018) report that although surimono contained images, they were not intended for public display but rather for close examination in private. Both the images and the poetry rewarded careful study.
Poetry has always been an integral part of Japanese culture and consistently linked with other art forms. The combination of poetry with image is part of a long Japanese tradition combining literature and art (Hanaoka, 2019) 3 | PHOTOPOETRY Nott (2018) describes the origins of photopoetry as being from the mid-19th century. He considers that the most engaging works 'combine the visuality of photography and the textuality of poetry to create multisensory sites reliant upon the independence and interdependence of text and image'. Nott also categorises photopoetry into collaborative and retrospective: Collaborative is where a photographer and a poet work together on a project, whereas retrospective refers to instances where a photographer makes images to accompany an existing collection of poems (often some time after the poems were written and rarely the other way round with a poet writing verse to accompany an existing collection of photographs).
Retrospective work was more common in the 19th and early 20th century, whereas collaborative endeavours became the most common type from the mid-20th century onwards. Nicholls and Ling (n.d.) give an excellent overview of published photopoetic work, with examples from retrospective books such as Leaves of Grass (Weston & Whitman, 1942)  It is interesting to note that among the many examples of photopoetry shown by Nott (2018) and by Nicholls and Ling (n.d.), very few have the poem as intimately integrated with the image as is the case in surimono. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the poem is printed on a facing page or underneath/alongside the image. This is quite understandable when the poems are too long to incorporate alongside the photograph. However, even when the poems are short, such as in Haiku-vision in poetry and photography (Atwood, 1977), nearly all of the poems are on a white background next to the photograph (see the example shown in Figure 2).

| PHOTO SURIMONO
Inspired by surimono, we collaborated to create a form of the genre using photographs and poems integrated into a single image. The first photographs used were made as part of a series called Flora In Extremis, part of the body of work submitted by one of us (Coe, 2021) for a Creative Arts degree. The series as a whole looks at some of the threats faced by plant life. The photographs in the surimono section were concerned with the forms of flowers that have yet to reach, or have passed, that stage of perfection usually associated with a perfect bloom, and were influenced by study of Art Forms In Nature by Karl Blossfeldt (Adam, 2017). Unlike surimono, the image came first, and the poet (plant scientist Anne Osbourn) responded to it. The dialogue between photographer and poet and the process per se allowed a response not just to the image itself and to other influences.
Queen of the Night, for example, as well as being the name of the tulip, is also the title of a relief sculpture in the British Museum (Collon, 2005) depicting the Mesopotamian god Ereshkigal, and the poem references this. Xochitl in cuicatl alludes to the origins of the dahlia in South America, whereas Jerusalem Sage is a reference to the power of the image. The image and text are combined but do not follow the strict formatting discipline of kyoka poetry, instead forming an integrated image influenced by, but not adhering to the rules of, surimono (Figure 3). Their intention is to be, like surimono, 'pointed and clever … carry a message' (Sutro, n.d.).

| COMMENTARY AND FEEDBACK
In these pieces, the photographer and poet have responded to the surimono tradition to represent and explore plants.  surimono has been asleep, but Anne and Bob have roused it from its slumber to stunning effect!

| FUTURE POTENTIAL
The contemporary adaptation of the surimono form clearly has the potential for fostering and fuelling relationships between plants and people. The metaphor of 'plant blindness' has recently come into currency as a way of drawing attention to tendencies to overlook the variety, significance and even existence of plant species that are encountered in everyday lives (Wandersee & Schussler, 1999). Though the metaphor is of value in shaping attention, it has limitations that go beyond its potential to add to existing stigmatisation of unsighted and partially sighted people