Nick Veasey. When Science Meets Art

I always admired details of Adobe product design, but only recently I find out who is behind it all and how it is made (and it is made in inter­est­ing and unusual way). I intro­duce you Nick Veasey — ace of x-​ray pho­to­graphy. And Adobe is just small potatoes.

Well, we have come to some­what lar­ger scale. When I first time saw this photo I could not believe that it is not a com­puter model. While search­ing for more inform­a­tion on it I found the pho­to­grapher I men­tioned before. I was con­vinced that it is true that all N. Veasey works are pho­to­graphed using impress­ive in size and com­plic­ated tech­nique of x-​ray pho­to­graphy. In his busi­ness he is aided in every way by sci­ent­ists and tech­ni­cians who know how to use that machinery properly.

The begin­ning was rather funny. Once father of N. Veasey’s girl­friend, who was a truck driver, was driv­ing a truck with thou­sands of Pepsi cans in it and one of those cans ought to be lucky one in a lot­tery to win $ 100 000 prize. Photographer ren­ted an x-​ray machine from hos­pital and was try­ing quickly to get rich. Unfortunately, he did not find his prize. But this event, as you can see, didn’t leave Nick Veasey without nothing.

He began tak­ing pic­tures from age of 14 (it was rather pop­u­lar with youth then) and even sold a couple of his pic­tures to record com­pany, although he was self thought and just star­ted. This kind of achieve­ments encour­aged N. Veasey to con­tinue mak­ing photographs.

Currently, N. Veasey is highly regarded world­wide for his con­sist­ent and ori­ginal style. He is com­mis­sioned by most emin­ent brands, and he is awar­ded by organ­izers of most pres­ti­gi­ous competitions.

The tech­nique itself is much more com­plic­ated than it could seem from the first sight. Every single thing is dif­fer­ent, and it is dif­fer­ent because of its struc­ture. And if you want to pre­cisely depict the beauty of that thing, which we usu­ally can’t see because our phys­ical restric­tions, you need to irra­di­ate it with x-​rays of cor­res­pond­ing strength. For example if you want to pho­to­graph Boeing plane you have to take sev­eral pic­tures using dif­fer­ent strength x-​rays. After that everything is fin­ished in Photoshop. N. Veasey doesn’t hide his fas­cin­a­tion and thank­ful­ness for this tool. I don’t know if that could be a com­mer­cial trick, but he says that without Adobe he just couldn’t cre­ate what he cre­ates now.

N. Veasey is a per­fect example of inter­est­ing things hap­pen­ing when sci­ence and new tech­no­lo­gies help to find its place in art.

You can find more works by Nick Veasey here.

About author:

Aleksandr Pasevin
Aleksandr Pasevin is Art Pit’s strategist and designer, responsible for organization’s creative solutions. Aleksandr is also actively interested in new technologies, their connection with creativity and usage in cultural organizations. Aleksandr dislikes long discussions and considerations, and he mostly expresses his opinion quickly about whet... Read further >