The Amateur Art Collector

Wired Online posted a neat little article last week featuring the work of artist Robert Buelteman, who uses a jeopardous technique (related to Kirlian photography) that employs high voltage electricity:

Buelteman begins by painstakingly whittling down flowers, leaves, sprigs, and twigs with a scalpel until they’re translucent. He then lays each specimen on color transparency film and, for a more detailed effect, covers it with a diffusion screen. This assemblage is placed on his “easel”—a piece of sheet metal sandwiched between Plexiglas, floating in liquid silicone. Buelteman hits everything with an electric pulse and the electrons do a dance as they leap from the sheet metal, through the silicone and the plant (and hopefully not through him), while heading back out the jumper cables. In that moment, the gas surrounding the subject is ionized, leaving behind ethereal coronas. He then hand-paints the result with white light shining through an optical fiber the width of a human hair, a process so tricky each image can take up to 150 attempts.

The resulting series is being catalogued in a book titled Signs of Life. 

I can’t say that I’m a huge fan of most nature photography, but I do like the idea of an artist employing life-threatening techniques to obtain images of dainty flowers.