Thursday Salute to Originals: Revealing the Structure of Nature
We’ve wrapped up a couple of intense installs recently, and we’re now finally able to bask in that always-satisfying feeling of completion. After that last surface panel is put in place and we’ve tuned the last LED, we can officially dust off our hands and wait for professional photographs of the finished space.
While great for our portfolio (and our own sense of pride and accomplishment!), the only downside in those beautiful finished photographs is that you only see the face of the project – the frosting on the cake. The integral and important components key to the success of the project are hidden behind the finished surface, and sadly, forgotten. But physicist-turned-artist, Arie van ‘t Riet, seems to understand our sentiment – just with slightly different subject matter.
Like the cake underneath the frosting or the assembly behind our backlit features, Arie van’t Riet realizes just how essential and beautiful hidden structure truly is to an object. Using his scientific background in radiology coupled with X-ray technology, he photographs plants and animals, depicting various forms of nature with stunning (albeit haunting) results.
Adding delicate coloration to the original black and white X-rayed image, these portraits come alive with an inside view (literally) to the core components giving nature its form. Offering an entirely new and insightful perspective into what lies beneath the surface, these photos capture the striking and complex interworkings of life that normally go unseen, unacknowledged, and unappreciated.
For realizing and capturing the beauty in hidden structure, we salute Arie van’t Riet and his originally artistic/scientific approach. Now all we need is a way to do this with our projects. Think a combo X-ray machine/camera will be on the market anytime soon? Maybe an X-ray filter on Instagram? Until then, we’ll have to wait, and take photos of our backlit features the old fashioned way, while remembering to document the significance of the sub-structures in our own minds!
Image source: X-Ray Photography of Nature