This week has been unusually busy, and quite frankly I underestimated how much work writing was.
I figured that doing something that I've done every day since I was five years old couldn't be that difficult, but cohesive storytelling is hard.
And the sad thing is that I'm not even doing the cohesive part.
Nevertheless, I wanted to write something and I thought a short vignette on an old favorite image of mine might flow easily - a piece of science, art, abstraction, and mystery.
Meet Heme.
Breaking the Scales
Photography is so often associated with literalism that its name alone has become indicative of infallible reproduction - from photographic evidence to photographic memory, the camera has come to be seen as the impartial arbiter of truth.
But as a medium of art, the ability to reproduce a scene or subject exactly as it was does not always result in an image that is easily recognized and understood.
Macro (high magnification) photography is fascinating because it can provide a perfect rendition of a subject that means absolutely nothing to the brain.
As we saw in 002 last week, looking closely enough at any object can yield unexpected results - in that case, the woven, alien landscape of the human eye.
Heme, the image you see above, is an example of one of the earliest macro images I created with such an intent.
Through macro photography, something in the real world can become inscrutably abstract, and when one's sense of scale is sufficiently lost, all that's left behind is a frame of tones and colors for the mind to interpret freely.
When first sharing these images, I wondered whether not to tell the viewer what they were actually looking at.
I found that providing these simple answers were a frighteningly strong deterrent to active imagination, so I typically chose to hear their interpretation and thoughts first.
Later, I might share the relatively inconsequential truth of what it was they were actually looking at.
So in that respect, let's agree to this - if you're curious to find out or confirm your guess as to what the image is send me a reply or leave a comment and we can talk about it.
But for now, forget about trying to figure out what you're physically looking at, and tell me about what you see.
There's no right or wrong answer - I'm genuinely curious to see what you have to say. But here's what I saw.
The Notorious RBC's
The name itself ought to give some suggestion - the heme group is a chemical structure critical to life. As the functional component of hemoglobin, hemes allow red blood cells (RBC's, hence the forced subheading) to carry oxygen from our lungs to every part of our bodies.
I talk a lot about physics, but in reality I was trained more heavily as a biochemist. Biomedical engineering is a blend of every quantitative subject you can think of, and while I eventually landed on optics and photonics as my specialty, it wouldn't have been biomedical engineering without an extra-heavy dose of organic chemistry, biochemistry, and general biology.
When I captured this image, I saw a roiling mass of red blood cells, tumbling over one another, spilling outwards and rushing towards the viewer.
The brooding shadows added a mysterious tone, where a murky solution seemed to pull away from the surface of the image over unknown depths, while the highlights brought out hidden ridges and patterns on the surface of the stream.
Looking at the image long enough even made it look three dimensional. Try it.
No really, try it.
Heme has run through several iterations, mostly based around color. The original, of course, was the color of the subject (that's right, the color you see here is artificial). The second iteration, which was shown above, was made bright red, as blood might be.
While it caught attention as a 36" x 24" glossy aluminum print during SXSW 2016, in retrospect, it felt more than a bit tacky.
The current and final version lives in black and white, and you can see it below.
The image was shot on my Nikon, not one of the super-cameras I use today, so the resolution is not nearly as jaw dropping as the eye, but you can zoom in on some of the details below.
So with that context, all that I have left for you are questions.
What do you think? What do you feel? Do you see what I see? Do you see something else?
Busy week aside, I always intended to use this medium as a space for stylistic experimentation across a variety of subjects and media, and today I'm satisfied with leaving more questions than answers.
Looking forward to what I hope will be an active discussion!
Until next time, much love.
Arnab