Finnish artist Erno Erik Raitanen—who brought us edible cotton candy sculptures—created ‘self-portraits’ out of his own bacteria.
What he calls ‘Bacteriograms’, the brightly-colored images—that are more like photograms, and not so much like photographs—were made by collecting bacteria samples from his own body, and cultivating the bacteria samples on photographic film.
The bacteria consumed the film surface to produce the unusual images.
“I have been removed from the process but, at the same time, the images are a product of my body,” Raitanen said in a statement.
“With this work I want to raise questions about representation and reality; the nature and the place of photographic medium in contemporary society.”
[via Erno-Erik]