Lately my mind has been wandering to the enormous suffering of a world at war on many fronts, as it fills what feels like every conversation and screen right now.   In this project I have been looking for a scale beyond the human scale, perhaps to find comfort in the transient nature of all things.   I have been working with radiolarians that I have photographed at 2500x scale -100 million year old microfossils nearly invisible to the human eye, that are windows into deep time, witness to evolution and the continuity of life, from the big bang of life (the Cambrian Explosion) to, and beyond, our eventual fall (as all empires and species do).  They are emblematic of resilience, beyond human endeavors and the entire human narrative, and therefore represent in a way a transcendence of suffering. Their smallness eclipses us, making us a speck in their universe beyond scale.

I had the incredible pleasure of photographing these microfossils with the WORLD’S SMALLEST SCANNING ELECTRON MICROSCOPE in my own back yard. The images below are radiolarian skeletons (marine plankton), made up of anywhere from 20-80 scans stitched together. These microscopes make images using electrons instead of light and scans rather than still frames. Even though it took dozens of scans to make these image, and a magnification of 2500x, each cluster is only the size of a speck of dust!!! This project felt like having theWebb or Hubble telescope in my own backyard for several months, but in reverse, going in and in and in... All told I spent around 150 hours searching hundreds of thousands of microfossil samples for ones that were locked in an embrace or dance by the chance connection of some parts of their spines, which happened millions of years after their deaths. The results are these grainy poetic pairings that remind me of old black and white film! You can see NatGeo Tik-Tok to learn more HERE.