Jason Koster’s 2023 photography series, Of Seed and Self, is a haunting and poetic meditation on identity, gesture, and transformation. In this series, Koster turns his lens toward the timeless form of the seed 
pods of the Devil’s Claw plant— ageless and genderless, natural objects reimagined through multiplicity and scale. Gently silhouetted and suspended against a stark field of white, each seed pod is rendered with clarity and shadow, their textured surfaces and clawed extensions emerging not only as botanical curiosities but as emotive, insect-like figures—entities caught mid-gesture, mid-thought.
Koster feels the seed pod bridges past, present and future, holding memory and potential in equal measure, a natural vessel of both origin and becoming. The series introduces each pod as a lone individual to set an understanding point for transformation. 
Through compositional pairing with itself the pod emerges anew as a botanical inkblot test, their contours ambiguous, inviting subjective interpretation. Koster evolves these forms into duets of tension and cooperation, creating visual metaphors for internal conflict, collective identity, and transformation. Some pods appear in conflict with themselves, while others seem to lean gently into union—gestures not unlike the forms of modern dance, where bodies meet and redefine each other in motion.
The work is deeply minimal and conceptual, yet charged with symbolic resonance. By monumentalizing the miniature, 
Koster draws attention to the internal complexity of what might otherwise go unnoticed. The resulting photographs are not simply portraits of natural forms, but studies in psychological suggestion and visual ambiguity—photographs that blur the boundary between the botanical and the anthropomorphic, the familiar and the alien, the self and the other.