Using sophisticated X-ray cameras, the photographer has created ghostly images that transform the appearance of people and the world around them. He finds beauty skin deep – producing pictures that range from a dramatic image of skeletal passengers on a bus to the delicate textures of a flower.
Veasey’s studio in maidenhead, Berkshire, is unlike any other artist’s garret. Inside a lead-lined room, he places flowers, insects and objects to be photographed. Larger compositions require industrial X-ray machines. One of his most arresting pictures – of a bus – was taken using a device normally employed by American border police to scan vehicles. But the passenger images are, in fact, of only one man’s body. He X-rayed a single corpse – lent by an undertaker – before scanning the image into his computer and creating multiple images in a variety of poses. He then positioned these inside the image of the bus.
Since their discovery in 1895 by the German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen, X-rays have revolutionised medicine. Rontgen discovered that waves produced by sending a electric charge through a radioactive source could penetrate objects and reproduce the outline of the denser material hidden below the surface onto film. Veasey uses the same principle to capture the hidden outline of bone, metal or plastic.
Delicate subjects such as flowers and insects require a more sensitive machine, capable of revealing the translucent quality of wings and petals, and the tiny structures within them. The film is turned into a digital file, which Veasey manipulates to create his final picture. Each image can cost tens of thousands of pounds to produce. Veasey, 47, a London born former advertising photographer who hit on the idea of using X-rays while photographing props for a television show, says his work serves to question our obsession with celebrity, image and beauty. “I like to challenge the automatic way in which we react to external physical appearance by highlighting the often surprising inner beauty of things,” he said. His use of the X-ray equipment deployed at airports, official buildings and even schools as a means of tackling crime and terrorism is a reminder that for 21st century man, personal privacy is fast disappearing, In art, as in life, there is no longer any hidden place.
