Hasta La Ideas

You might remember watching in awe as your grade school science teacher magically lit up an LED with a potato or three. There’s not much to it—a natural acid serves as the electrolytic medium between a pair of terminals—but it’s certainly a clever way to illustrate the basic principles of batteries and circuits. Now, photographer Caleb Charland is bringing back the science of natural batteries in a series of photos that might just evoke the same sense of wonder as those classroom demos from your childhood.

Back to Light, features daisy chains of fresh fruit basking in a glow of their power, so to speak. The apples and limes are a little more photogenic than the tubers that traditionally serve as the humble battery, but given his sense of composition, we’d bet that Charland could make potatoes look this good too. Since the long-exposure photographs are illuminated solely by their subject matter to make for a kind of autonomous still life, the light source is paramount; the arrangements are either backlit or clustered around the bulb, huddled together in quasi-ritualistic fashion powering small light sources.

The project is not only intriguing for highlighting the unusual use of fruit in an energy-giving sense, but also for fueling our curiosity about just how many citruses it would take to sustain household lights.

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