A Nick Veasey image asks the same question every time: what does this thing actually consist of, once the surface is gone? Whether the subject is a Balenciaga gown, a Boeing 777, or a single flower, the work strips away appearance entirely, leaving only structure, and in doing so locates a strange, ghostly beauty that the original object never visibly possessed.
It is a quiet rebuttal to a culture obsessed with image, made using the one technology guaranteed to see past it.
Veasey works with industrial and medical-grade X-ray equipment from a purpose-built lead-lined studio in Kent, often combining hundreds of individual exposures into a single composite image, as with his life-size Boeing 777, built from over a thousand separate X-rays. He came to the medium by accident in 1996, asked to X-ray a cola can for television, and has worked almost exclusively this way since.
His work entered the Victoria and Albert Museum's British National Collection of Photography following a multi-year collaboration with the museum's fashion archive, and has earned more than fifty international awards, including honours from D&AD and the IPA Lucie Awards. A 2017 retrospective at Fotografiska Stockholm drew over 100,000 visitors.
