Microbe Portraits Capture The
Gorgeous Interaction Of Photography And Bacteria
By: Katherine Brooks
Source: Huffington Post
Seung-Hwan Oh, an artist based in South Korea, presents
the interaction of bacteria and film in his art, one of few artistic concepts
that can truly be considered “new” rather than “a form of something else”. To
accomplish this task, Oh submerges developed film into water, adding into it several
microbes. It takes months to even years, as the microbes go to work eating away
at light-sensitive chemicals on the photographs. This allows for rather unrecognizable
portraits of people whose faces no longer show, as they appear fairly
rearranged, similar to the combination of water and fire on a large, fresh blob
of ink. The act of artistic destruction is somewhat transient, as the bacteria
often acts so aggressively, leaving only the slightest edge bearing hope of
strength within the fragility of the film, barely allowing it to be digitized
before it fully disintegrates. The pictures below present a collection of
images from his work fittingly titled “Impermanence”.
Through the windows of advancing
technology and unrealistic perceptions of life as a result of it, emotionless
robots take away from the wonder of the handmade unrealistic depictions of
life, which are clearly unrealistic, replacing them with distortions done so
perfectly, that confusion and meaning is lost and a sense of emptiness conveys
the so-called art. With the use of organic matter (bacteria) to create such
distortions in otherwise ordinary portraits, the viewer of such altered realism
remains curious on the means of the creation, rather than emotionless at the
unquestionable ability of technology if it were the producer. Through Oh’s
artwork, the true ability of single-celled organisms, seemingly harmless and
treated rather indifferently, is exposed. “Subjects
blur into negative space, creating a sort of dystopian nightmare, in which the
material world is slowly being consumed by tiny single-celled organisms (Brooks, 1). The areas of the photographs
remaining visible, present the ability to speak even louder through concealed
identity, than if completely exposed to the naked eye, depicting the characters
of the people, rather than the people themselves.
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