Bevil Templeton-Smith

Lives and works in West Molesey, UK

Artist statement

I photograph crystals through a 1970 Leitz Orthoplan polarising microscope. I am not trying to represent anything. What interests me is that a material left to itself, under the right conditions, arranges into something this ordered. I did not design any of it. I found the conditions and the angle, and then I looked. I melt substances on a glass slide and let them cool and crystallise. What forms is not predictable. I set the conditions and the crystal does the rest, and no two slides are the same. Then I photograph it between polarising filters set at ninety degrees to each other. Crossed like that, the filters block all the light. The only reason there is a picture at all is that the crystal interferes with the light passing through it, and the colours are not added, they are what that interference does. Turn the stage to the angle of extinction and the whole thing goes black. Most of the equipment I have had to make myself. The wave plate is a sheet of mica I cut, because the ones you can buy give the wrong colours. The adapter that joins a Sony digital camera to a fifty six year old microscope is built from parts of an old Leitz microscope camera, metal tube and glue, and I am still improving it. Focus is by hand. Nothing here is generated, simulated or painted, and nothing is added afterwards. All real. I could print any of these any number of times. I print each one once. Edition of one, every time, which is a decision rather than a limitation.

Artwork