Chris Whitney's "MICROSCOPIC"

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It's where the fibre of the art is, isn't it Chris? The first thing I think of here is van Gogh's purples in the wheat. Where did he get that color from? The eye isn't picking it out, but it's there, submerged from view perhaps but not absent from the structures of everyday life. This is the first time I read that you had "lab days" and like a flash so many of your pictures come into sharper focus. I was just about to write about the glare in your outhouse picture, the way it flakes off the doorway (and off my retina) in the dark contrasts of the buildings, and here a few pictures over is the explanation: A camera like a microscope is such a cool tool to use while searching for secrets, not just of angles and textures and shadows, but also from feelings, from life. There is science in these photos, and science bursts with unimaginable poetry and color, as in this connective tissue sample; it's cool that you can make a poetry of these underlying lines and ties. And isn't the object of all science to get us closer to understanding the poetry of being?

You can see more of Chris Whitney's photographs at his website, or at his JPG site.