Radiographic: X-Ray Photo Inventions

A large part of photographer/artist/printmaker Steve Miller’s work has been devoted to walking the line to the intersection of art and science. In Radiographic we get to see the first collision of these incredible experiments in book form. Working with scientific equipment including electron microscopes, X-rays, MRI machines, and even Rorschach blots, Miller examines natural subjects (and sometimes man-made ones) through an x-ray technology that results in the creation of surprisingly beautiful representational and abstract imagery. Admired equally by scientists with whom he has worked at places like New York’s Brookhaven National Laboratory; art curators who have exhibited and/or written about his work, like The National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC and essayist Peter Schjeldahl; as well as consumers who eagerly snatch up his wall-sized prints at places like Artspace, Miller’s totally breakthrough and exciting explorations have created the unique profile of an artist who thinks conceptually while engaging universally, making exquisite artworks based on such diverse elements as blood cells, x-rays of plants and animals from the Amazon rainforest, the folding of proteins, and the movement of ions. Impossible to describe without sounding ridiculously arcane, but impossible to resist once the artworks are viewed, this book offers an opportunity to see the work of a creative talent described by The New Yorker magazine as “qualifying as a Prophet”. Here is a man who has expanded the boundaries of what we know as ‘art’.