While making cyanotypes one weekend, I noticed something interesting about the forms of the living and dead fern leaves.

Living fern cyanotype

The living fern was rigid and stagnant, whereas the dead fern appears fluid in motion as if it were dancing in the wind.

Dead fern cyanotype

Interesting how in life the fern is flexible, living tissue, but in the image, it appears almost skeletal. The dead fern, crisp and motionless in reality, appears to be loose and flexible, perhaps alive, in the solar image. 

The duality of what we perceive as life and death is challenged in this imagery; for the fern versus the image of the fern, what does it mean to persist? Does the life of the fern persist after death through the image?