Artist Focus: Nick Veasey
Land-rovers, Louboutin shoes or Volkswagen vans... No object of our everyday life escapes the X-rays of our English photographer Nick Veasey, who for 13 years has been constantly dissecting our habits to capture their deepest essence. His works can be seen in major international collections, such as the Victoria & Albert museum in London, the Pushkin museum in Moscow and the Taipei museum of contemporary art.
"My main inspirations are the normally invisible intrinsic details of my subjects, which I reveal through X-rays. My work is essentially a statement against superficiality. By stripping the surface and focusing on the substance of an object, one can understand how and why it could have existed in that form. An X-ray shows the evolution of an object, whether it was designed by man or by nature," he says. X-rays are radioactive and therefore dangerous. They form a spectrum of light, but this spectrum is invisible to the human eye. So Nick Veasey uses something invisible to make the normally invisible interior of his subject visible. The image on the film is the same size as the object, and because the film is in the form of small sheets, it is often a lot of separate X-rays that will make up the final image. His radiograph of a Mini, for example, consists of more than 350 separate X-rays that are then digitally superimposed, which can take a long time.
"I want to reach people's minds and make them appreciate the beauty and complexity of the world. At a certain level, my work is immediate - you see an X-ray, you see inside. But if you look at it more closely, you discover incredible details. The more you look at my photos, the more you will continue to discover. Beauty is everywhere, just sometimes you have to look closely to see it."