Pitchblende Portrait #1 and #2 , 2009
Lenticular poster
33 x 45 cm

 

Pitchblende was used by Marie Curie as a means of determining the origin of the radiation accidentally discovered by Henri Becquerel in 1896. In addition to experimenting with this form of uranium ore in the photographic series How, by chance, Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity and Nuclear Dust, as well as in the video Exhibitions/Exposures: 5 times 3’30”, Bettina Samson has also put it to scientific uses in the two photographs Pitchblende Portrait #1 and #2. Here the portrait genre specified in the title provides individual, formal Characterisations of each mineral specimen, and in so doing subversively anthropomorphises them. Presented as a negative – black on a white background – this image reverses the mineral’s irradiation effect, which on film produces white spots on a black background. However the notion of image-reversal is counterbalanced by the illusion of relief provided by a lenticular poster. Charged with a new optical effect, the object seems to take on another dimension and produce a special kind of after-image. Immortalised in these portraits, it is summoned up again by memory and, with the “special effects” that have given in its place in the history of science, handed on to posterity.

Text by Anne-Lou Vicente in “Bettina Samson”, La Galerie, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Noisy-le-Sec (exhibition 5 December 2009 – 13 February 2010).

Photography: Cedrick Eymenier.

 

 

© NETTIE HORN