he English Hugh Turvey is internationally recognised for his x-ray works and as one of the worlds few contemporary x-ray artists. In this gallery you can see some images from his recent flower themed production. Born 5/6/71 in Chippenham Wilts (West Country between Bath and Swindon), he trained as a designer / art director but on discovering photography he retrained under iconic photographer Gered Mankowitz. During 1996/1997 he started experimenting with x-ray/shadow photography after being asked to create an alternative “revealing” image for an album cover. “In my experience anyone who works within radiography has moments outside of the normal job remit and curiosity drives them to x-ray objects within easy reach: their shoe, their hand, their wife’s hand etc. This was certainly true for Roentgen (the first x-ray of his wife Anna Bertha’s hand) and it was the same for me. One of my earliest images is of my wife Artemi’s leg taken over 12 years ago when she was 29. It is a beautiful hand-coloured x-ray image of her tibia, fibula, ossa tarsi, metatarsals and phalanges or simply titled ‘foot in stiletto’. It is a modern scientific vision of a ‘femme fatale’ … the allure of the woman in a stiletto and the visual insight to how the foot is indubitably contorted”. With the encouragement of the Science Photo Library he went on to produce an extensive series of coloured x-rays of everyday objects, which were first published on the 4 April 1999 in The Observer Magazine, LIFE, UK. In the same year Credit Suisse discovered Hugh’s x-ray vision and commissioned 6 ground breaking “motion x-ray” European TV commercials. He continues to experiment with the new emerging x-ray technologies to produce his imagery for projects and commission. The work is observationally perceived and is a multi-stage process leading to intense detail capture with some overt unique colouring techniques applied by hand.
“There is a technique to produce a photographic image without a camera by placing objects directly onto the surface of a photo-sensitive material such as photographic paper and then exposing it to light. These are called photograms (or as Man Ray called the “rayographs”) and is one of the first photographic imaging techniques ever used by William Fox Talbot (and he called them “photogenic drawings”). Simply put, the only difference between my x-ray images and the photograms produced by the early photographic pioneers is the frequency of the “light” used to expose the “paper”. I have created (unlike the “Roentgenogram” which is pertaining to the originators name) a more generic term ‘XOGRAM’ to define my x-ray images within the context of my photographic background and the cross over of my visible light and x-ray images.”
