Hugh Turvey

“Hugh Turvey, contemporary pioneer of the x-ray art genre over 25 years, has witnessed first-hand the advances of imaging and is uniquely positioned between the aesthetic photographic and radiographic worlds. His work has cultural, art historical and photographic reference points which bridge the divide between science and art. His work appears in an extensive plethora of artistic collaborations and publications.”

— Michael Pritchard FRPS, Director General of the Royal Photographic Society, UK. 2018

In 2009, Hugh was appointed the first Artist in Residence for The British Institute of Radiology, since its inauguration in 1924 and Royal Charter granted by Her Majesty the Queen in 1958. In 2014, Hugh was awarded a Royal Photographic Society Honorary Fellowship, in recognition of his innovative imaging work and its role to promote public scientific engagement.

XOGRAMS

Hugh works with traditional photographic techniques that produce images without a camera. By placing objects directly onto the surface of a photo-sensitive material and exposing it to light, a silhouette of the object is created on the material. It is a captured shadow of the object. These are called photograms and coincidentally were one of the first photographic imaging techniques used by William Fox Talbot, who called them photogenic drawings.

Now, since the discovery of x-ray by Röntgen, it is possible to create x-ray photograms (e.g. skiagrams, Röntgenograms, shadowgraphs, radiographs). He has continued this classification naming heritage and created the term XOGRAM.

PUBLICATION

Hugh is a prolific collaborator and consequently his work is published in many varied applications and exhibitions. Recent collaborations include LVMH and CHANEL. He also features in this month’s Italian Vogue.

View a selection of Hugh’s works below ↓

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