Fixing an Electron by Adam Nadel

Issue 148

I am using an electron beam from a particle accelerator to make photographs.  These images are not made with a traditional camera but through a stream of subatomic electron particles striking and interacting with the silver halide salt found in color photographic paper. The beam was generated on a LINAC electron particle accelerator at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, outside of Chicago, IL, where I was the 2018 Artist in Residence. The color in the images is the result of the interaction with the electron beam and additional exposure of the paper to photons during processing. Every image is unique, ranging in size from 30”x30 to 40”x120” and captured on Crystal Archive Photo Paper. 

Protons and electrons are names of ideas – physically omnipresent yet seemingly inaccessible to our sensory experience. In a sense images are “portraits” of this invisible natural world, creating form of, and with, the physical building blocks of time and space via the influence of magnetic fields, deflection, and absorption. Photographs without light and referent, yet real.

I believe that art and science are our species’ most meaningful achievements, and creating bridges between the two is akin to seeking harmony in our disjunctive culture. The confluence of these two intellectual and physical traditions amplify both, creating momentary, and perhaps even sustainable, emotional and intellectual understanding for the beauty of our mysterious world and wonderment in how we are trying to comprehend it.

Tipping my hat to Man Ray, I am calling these images “Nadelgrams” as there is no known record of employing an electron beam to create photographic art. 

Adam Nadel lives and works in Queens, NY.
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images © Adam Nadel