S. Billie Mandle, Our Lady of Good Counsel

S. Billie Mandle, Saint Christopher

From Reconcilliation, photographs of confessionals.

S. Billie Mandle, Drosophila melanogaster, no. 4

S. Billie Mandle, Arabidopis thalania, no. 14 & 16

"These are photographs of two organisms used as model systems in genetics: mustard weeds (Arabidopsis thaliana) and fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster). The organisms have been studied by biologists for over 60 years and are at the source of most biotechnology and agricultural developments. They are tools, integral to science and perfectly engineered, yet they are also a part of nature, just beyond complete understanding."

From S. Billie Mandle's series Model Systems.  More photos here.

"Billie Mandle uses her camera as an epistemological tool. The thing about her pictures that gets under your skin is not so much their silence as it is their brazen, stubborn refusal to resolve into familiar certainties. To look at one of her photographs is to invite dangerous uncertainties like truth, belief, and justification to have their proper seats with you at the table, and once seated the do not go away easily. You might just as well set off a bomb in the middle of your living room, the effect would be the same. The only thing these pictures leave you with is the hope of something like a genuine dialog: seeing as touch, seeing as negotiation, seeing as a way of growing closer to the peculiar state of things as they are and not as we think they should be. Seeing till, in the end, we are (always and eternally) standing somewhere rich and strange."

Michael Zachary here.