Week 1 HW: Final Project Ideas

Living Photographic Material: Can Living Matter Manufacture a Photographic Image?

Rationale: Rethinking the Material Ecology of Photography

Photography is often used to observe and document environmental change, but photography itself is a material practice embedded in environmental systems. Photographic images depend on physical substrates, photosensitive materials, manufacturing infrastructures, extraction, processing, and waste.

Contemporary experimental photographic practices have questioned this materiality by asking whether living systems themselves can participate in the production of photographs. Almudena Romero’s work is a particularly relevant example. Through projects such as The Pigment Change and Farming Photographs, she uses the photosensitive properties of plants to produce images through light, photosynthesis, and naturally occurring pigment changes. Rather than treating plants only as the subject of a photograph, her work makes them active photographic surfaces and agents in the image-making process. Farming Photographs goes further by cultivating large-scale living images through plants, reframing photography as a process enacted by living organisms.

A related approach can be seen in Lara Tabet’s The Vitreous body, presented at the Rencontres d’Arles (France) in 2026. Tabet develops an experimental process of bacteriography in which microorganisms collected from aquatic environments interact with the photosensitive gelatin of color film, altering its chemistry through biological corrosion and erosion. The resulting images are therefore produced through an interaction between photographic material and living microorganisms.

This suggests a broader question:

Rather than simply replacing one photographic material with another, can the image-forming process itself be reorganized around the agency of living matter?

One possibility is to reconsider how photographic color is produced.

Structural color operates differently from pigmentary color: it emerges from the interaction of light with an organized physical structure through processes such as interference, diffraction, and scattering. In biological systems, these optical structures can themselves be produced by living organisms.

This makes structural color particularly interesting as a photographic process. Instead of manufacturing a colored substance and then using it to represent an image, the photographic process could potentially use a living system to manufacture the optical structure that produces the image.

If this principle can be demonstrated and controlled, it could ultimately provide a route toward a new photographic material: a biologically produced photosensitive layer, film, paper, or emulsion-like medium in which the image-forming optical properties are generated by living matter.

The ecological question is therefore not simply whether such a process would consume fewer resources than conventional photography. That remains an empirical question. Instead, this project asks whether photography can be reconceived as a process in which image formation is coupled to biological growth, organization, and transformation.

1. What / Why

I want to investigate whether a living material can manufacture an optical image from spatially structured light.

The central research question is:

Can spatially structured light be used as a manufacturing instruction to make a living structural-color material produce a spatially resolved optical image?

The motivation is both technological and artistic. Photography normally records an image by causing a material to undergo a physical or chemical change. Here, I want to investigate what happens when the material is alive and when the biological system itself participates in producing the optical structure through which the image becomes visible.

The key idea is therefore not to use biology as a replacement for a conventional printer. The biological system would itself be the manufacturing process: light provides spatial information, and the living material transforms that information through its own biological organization into an optical state.

There are important precedents for parts of this idea. Engineered E. coli have already been used as a biological film that records projected light as a spatial chemical image. Levskaya et al. demonstrated that projecting a pattern of light onto engineered bacteria could produce a high-definition two-dimensional chemical image, reported at approximately 100 megapixels per square inch.

Engineered E. coli have also been used to produce RGB color photographs by controlling pigment production in response to different wavelengths of light.

My proposal asks whether a different mechanism could be used: structural color generated by the spatial organization of living cells, rather than pigment production.

This distinction is important because structural color is not simply a colored substance produced by the organism. In Flavobacterium IR1, the organization of bacterial cells into three-dimensional photonic structures produces vivid structural colors, and the relationship between cellular organization and optical response has been experimentally characterized.

The project therefore investigates whether light can become a local manufacturing instruction for this biological organization, producing an image through the material’s own optical structure.

The central hypothesis is:

Spatially structured illumination can act as a local manufacturing input for a living structural-color material, producing spatially localized optical states that can encode image information.

This is a hypothesis to test, not an established capability.

If successful, the experiment would have a second implication for biomanufacturing: the biological system would not only produce a single image, but could potentially become the basis for manufacturing a new photographic material.

The longer-term objective would be to determine whether the living optical system could be developed into a reproducible photographic layer — for example, a biological film, coating, or eventually a photosensitive emulsion-like formulation — capable of receiving an image and manufacturing its optical state biologically.

In other words, the experiment would move from:

living system → image

toward:

living system → manufactured photographic medium → image

This would turn the biological process itself into a potential material-production platform.

2. Living System, Inputs, Process and Output

Living system

My primary candidate is a structurally colored bacterial colony, initially focusing on Flavobacterium IR1 or a closely related structurally colored Flavobacterium strain.

The reason for selecting this type of organism is that the biological organization of the colony is directly related to its optical appearance. In F. IR1, cells form organized three-dimensional structures that generate structural color.

The choice of organism will ultimately depend on several experimentally measurable properties:

sensitivity to light or compatibility with light-controlled biological processes;
ability to grow reproducibly as a spatially extended colony;
capacity for local biological reorganization;
strength and variability of structural color;
spatial localization of the response;
response time;
reversibility or persistence of the optical state;
compatibility with automated imaging and environmental control.

Inputs

The initial manufacturing inputs would be:

a living bacterial culture;
a suitable growth medium and controlled environmental conditions;
spatially structured illumination containing the image information;
time.

The image would be projected onto the living material.

Biological manufacturing process

The proposed process is:

image → structured light → living colony → biological reorganization → optical/structural-color change → image

The critical hypothesis is that different regions of illumination could produce sufficiently different biological states to create a spatially resolved optical pattern.

This is the part of the project that is not established by the literature I have found.

Existing work demonstrates separately that:

bacteria can respond spatially to projected light;
engineered bacteria can produce photographic images;
bacterial organization can produce structural color;
biological perturbations can modify structural color.

The experiment asks whether these phenomena can be coupled into:

structured light → biological organization → structural color → image

I would therefore treat the first phase explicitly as a hypothesis test rather than assume that light will control the photonic organization of Flavobacterium.

Output

The desired output is a living material whose optical properties contain spatial information corresponding to the illumination pattern.

The first successful output would not need to be a recognizable photograph. A successful result would be a reproducible optical difference between illuminated and non-illuminated regions, followed by increasingly fine spatial patterns.

The experiment must demonstrate that the optical change is:

spatially localized;
reproducible;
quantitatively measurable;
correlated with the spatial structure of the illumination.

Only after establishing this would I test whether a simple photographic image can be reproduced.

If this principle can be demonstrated, a subsequent development stage could investigate whether the biological optical state can be stabilized, transferred, cultivated, or formulated as a usable photographic layer.

This could potentially lead toward a biomanufactured photographic material in which the photosensitive and image-forming functions are provided by a living system.

3. Automation

Automation is important because the project is not only about making one biological photograph. It is about determining whether the living system can function as a controllable manufacturing process.

The experimental platform would combine:

programmable illumination + controlled culture + automated imaging + image analysis

The illumination system could independently control:

spatial pattern;
intensity;
wavelength or spectral composition;
exposure duration;
exposure sequence;
spatial position;
number of exposure cycles.

A camera would periodically record the biological material. Image analysis would quantify variables such as:

local color;
spectral response;
brightness/reflectance;
contrast between neighboring regions;
spatial correlation between the projected image and the biological output;
temporal evolution of the pattern;
stability or recovery of the optical state.

The system could therefore progress from simple automation to a closed-loop process:

project image → culture responds → camera measures output → algorithm compares output with target → next exposure is adjusted → repeat

This would allow the biological system to be treated as a manufacturing process whose parameters can be experimentally optimized rather than as a passive photographic substrate.

A second phase could investigate whether the same biological material can undergo repeated transformations:

image A → biological optical state A → image B → biological optical state B

This would test the possibility of a reusable or rewritable living photographic medium.

4. Meaningful Scale and Back-of-the-Envelope Calculation

For this project, scale should not be defined only as the number of photographs produced.

Three dimensions are more meaningful:

imageable area — how large a biological surface can be patterned;
effective biological spatial resolution — the smallest spatial variation in illumination that produces a reproducible and measurable optical variation;
temporal and cycle scale — how long image formation takes and whether the material can be transformed repeatedly.

I would initially measure spatial resolution experimentally rather than assume that it corresponds to either bacterial size or microscopic structural dimensions.

For example, an initial resolution test could expose bacterial cultures to patterns containing progressively smaller features such as:

1 mm;
500 µm;
250 µm;
100 µm.

These are experimental test levels, not predicted biological performance.

For a simple geometric estimate, a 10 × 10 cm surface contains:

at 1 mm spatial elements: approximately 10,000 elements;
at 500 µm: approximately 40,000 elements;
at 100 µm: approximately 1,000,000 elements.

These numbers describe the information capacity of an idealized surface. They do not imply that the bacteria can actually resolve these features.

As a methodological benchmark, engineered E. coli has previously produced a projected-light chemical image reported at approximately 100 megapixels per square inch. I would not use this as a predicted resolution for structural-color bacteria; it establishes only that biological systems can, under appropriate engineering conditions, spatially encode a large amount of image information.

A meaningful scale-up question for my system is therefore:

How much biological surface can be patterned while maintaining a measurable and reproducible spatial resolution and acceptable writing time?

If the principle works at small scale, the next biomanufacturing question becomes how to produce the same biological optical material over larger areas and in a reproducible physical format.

5. Three Biggest Unknowns / Bottlenecks

1. Can light actually control the relevant biological organization?

This is the fundamental unknown.

The literature establishes that Flavobacterium colonies self-organize into photonic structures and that their organization determines their optical response. Other bacterial systems demonstrate that light can spatially control biological organization or material formation.

Thus, several parts of the overall chain are established independently:

light can control biological responses in engineered bacteria;
bacterial organization can produce structural color;
some living systems can produce dynamic optical responses to illumination.

However, I have not found a published demonstration of the exact chain:

spatially structured light → local reorganization of a structural-color bacterial colony

This is therefore the first experiment to perform.

2. What is the effective biological spatial resolution?

Even if illumination changes the optical state, the response may spread spatially through growth, motility, signaling, or other biological processes.

The relevant measurement is therefore not the microscopic size of the cells, but the smallest illumination feature that generates a reproducible optical difference.

I would measure this by exposing cultures to standardized resolution patterns and quantifying the correlation between the input pattern and the resulting optical image.

3. Is the biological optical state persistent or reversible?

A useful photographic material could potentially operate in two very different ways.

A persistent transformation would create a biological photograph that remains after exposure.

A reversible transformation would create something closer to a living photographic display: one image could be transformed into another.

There is precedent for dynamic biological structural color. In the brown alga Cystoseira tamariscifolia, intracellular photonic structures produce structural color that changes reversibly with environmental illumination. Higher light levels cause the structural color to disappear gradually, while low-light conditions allow it to re-emerge.

This makes a reversible phase interesting, but I would treat it as a second-stage experiment rather than assume that the bacterial system will behave similarly.

6. Expected Outcome

The first success criterion is deliberately modest:

Demonstrate that spatially structured illumination can create a spatially localized, reproducible, and measurable optical state in a living structural-color material.

If this succeeds, the next question is whether those biological optical states can encode progressively more complex spatial information, eventually including a photographic image.

If a reversible system can also be identified, a further stage would test repeated image transformations:

image A → biological state A → image B → biological state B

This would shift the project from biological image production toward a genuinely living photographic medium.

If successful, the research could establish a new way of thinking about photographic material: rather than manufacturing a photosensitive chemical emulsion and exposing it to light, one could potentially manufacture the image-forming optical structure through a living system.

This opens a longer-term biomanufacturing pathway:

light → living organization → structural color → photographic image

and potentially:

living culture → reproducible photographic layer → biological film / coating / emulsion-like medium → photographic image

The important point is that the ultimate product would not be the individual photograph. The biomanufacturing opportunity would be the development of a new class of photographic material that could itself be produced biologically.

Such a material could potentially take several forms:

living photographic film;
coating deposited onto a conventional or biological substrate;
biological photographic paper;
photosensitive emulsion-like formulation containing the living image-forming system; or, if reversibility is demonstrated, a reusable or rewritable photographic medium, and even devices such as screen displays.

These are downstream possibilities rather than assumed outcomes of the first experiment. Their feasibility would depend on subsequent work on formulation, spatial stability, preservation, substrate compatibility, reproducibility, and control of the biological response.

The artistic significance would therefore not simply be that a photograph had been made with bacteria. The more fundamental shift would be that the photographic material itself could become a biological manufacturing process.

References

Romero, A. (2026). Farming Photographs. Almudena Romero.

Tabet, L., & Chemali, Y. (2026). Le corps vitré. Les Rencontres d’Arles 2026.

Levskaya, A., Chevalier, A. A., Tabor, J. J., et al. (2005). “Engineering Escherichia coli to see light.” Nature, 438, 441–442. DOI: 10.1038/nature04405.

Fernandez-Rodriguez, J., Moser, F., Song, M., & Voigt, C. A. (2017). “Engineering RGB color vision into Escherichia coli.” Nature Chemical Biology, 13, 706–708. DOI: 10.1038/nchembio.2390.

Schertel, L., van de Kerkhof, G. T., Jacucci, G., et al. (2020). “Complex photonic response reveals three-dimensional self-organization of structural coloured bacterial colonies.” Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 17, 20200196. DOI: 10.1098/rsif.2020.0196.

Lopez-Garcia, M., Masters, N., O’Brien, H. E., et al. (2018). “Light-induced dynamic structural color by intracellular 3D photonic crystals in brown algae.” Science Advances, 4(4), eaan8917. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aan8917.

AI Use Disclosure

Generative AI was used during the development of this work.

AI client: ChatGPT (OpenAI), GPT-5.6 Luna.

AI was used to:

help refine the project concept;
identify scientific literature and precedents;
critically review the proposed experimental design and identify unsupported claims.

The scientific claims and references included in the final document were independently checked against the cited sources. The final research question, artistic motivation, experimental direction, and decisions about what to include or exclude are my own.