This is a bacterial sensor that was developed to behave much photographic film. The light that strikes it causes a reaction which then produces a color shift in the affected areas.

Featured Parts (in the registry of ‘standard’ biological “parts” at MIT: Light Sensor

This is a coliroid portait of Andy Ellington. You can compare it with the real Andy. Image courtesy of UT/UCSF.

Compare this to “Mother and Child” by Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey who used a strain of grass that carried a mutation that kept it from fading and losing an image when exposed. The techniques they used to “fix” the grass for photographic purposes were developed in collaboration with plant biologists.

There are a few significant differences between “Mother and Child” and the coliroid above.

The coliroid is definitely synthetic, engineered by people to perform a specific function. The grass image was likely developed through artificial selection to maintain the lines of grass which carried the mutation. The mutation may have been induced with UV or some other mutagen, but this is a different process from building a specific function into an organism more or les from scratch.

Both of these images are made using a gigantic population of individuals- plants or bacteria, yet these populations are probably clonally reproducing- meaning the individuals are very similar. “Mother and Child” is a very large image- about 3ft x 5ft when hanging on a wall. The coliroids tend to be small- about the size of a petri dish- though they have a resolution of approximately 100 megapixels per square inch.

Both techniques employ the use of another organism to realize their images. How will these new kinds of photography affect these organisms, or rather how will they affect us?