Imogen Cunningham, Magnolia Blossom, 1925

Enzo Ragazzini, Illustration used for the cover of R.D. Laing’s Sanity, Madness and the Family, 1970

“Ruth, Roses and Revolvers”
Man Ray, Los Angeles 1942-44
[gelatin silver print | 24.9 × 19.8 cm.]

“This image illustrated a story by Man Ray in the journal View, and it was later used as the basis for a segment of Hans Richter's 1948 film Dreams That Money Can Buy. The film’s noir atmosphere of the photograph suggests the influence of Hollywood on Man Ray, who was living in Los Angeles when he made it. Interested in filmmaking but not in the collaborative process of studio-produced movies, Man Ray turned down offers to work as a cameraman.”

We have at last come to realize that neither the soils, the oceans, nor the atmosphere can be comprehended without taking into account the participation of innumerable organisms, from the lichens that crumble rocks, and the bacterial entities that decompose organic detritus, to all the respiring plants and animals exchanging vital gases with the air. The notion of earthly nature as a densely interconnected organic network—a “biospheric web” wherein each entity draws its specific character from its relations, direct and indirect, to all the others—has today become commonplace, and it converges neatly with Merleau-Ponty’s late denoscription of sensuous reality, “the Flesh,” as an intertwined, and actively intertwining, lattice of mutually dependent phenomena, both sensorial and sentient, of which our own sensing bodies are a part.

David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous

Domiziana Giordano in Nostalghia (dir. Andrei Tarkovsky)

But what if, instructed by the new animisms, we refuse to confine the category of personhood to humanity? What if anything we can call agential—which is to say anything in active relation with other things, anything that participates in the ongoing creation, destruction, and re-worlding of worlds—can from some perspective also be called a person? In that case, there would be an alternative to the equally unpalatable theologemes of anthropocentrism on the one hand and impersonalism on the other. In that case, to call all things divine would be to call divinity omnipersonal, taking shape as every kind of person, depending on the circumstance. Such a reconfiguration of personhood would unsettle the theistic notion that humanity is the pinnacle of creation, along with the attendant assumption that divinity looks more like a human being than a dingo, an ocean, or the electromagnetic force.

Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters (2018, pp.181-182)