“Natural objects may be made to delineate themselves without the aid of the artist’s pencil”


Henry Fox Talbot in The Pencil of Nature (1844-1846)


This project is based on taking images with a digital microscope. Even when this device is invented
250 years before photography, the relationship between both instruments can be established in
1840 when the first microscopic photographs of J. B Dancer were known.


The microscope was (and still is) thought as an objective and mechanical device.  But what implies
to take those images digitally and in an artistic way ? 

This leads to an interesting discussion about the objectivity and neutrality of the mechanism of the  objects that capture images.


On Plate XIII of his book The pencil of Nature, Talbot states: “This is one of the charms of
photography, the operator himself discovers on examination, perhaps long afterwards, that he has
depicted many things he had no notion of at the time”.


Precisely that is the goal of the microscope: to show what is not available at a first sight, what the  eye escapes.


The question is, once again, the same: ¿what are we talking about when we talk about
photographs?