Marina Vitaglione has used a traditional photographic technique to produce otherworldly images of samples of London's air pollution. Working alon

London air pollution turned into art to raise awareness

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2021-07-09 12:00:07

Marina Vitaglione has used a traditional photographic technique to produce otherworldly images of samples of London's air pollution.

Working alongside scientists from the London Air Quality Network, part of Imperial College London (ICL), Marina was given access to air samples from across the capital, including Brixton Road and Lewisham, south London.

Some she put on to a paper tape, using a beta-attenuation-monitoring (BAM) device, and then photographed through a microscope (below).

Others she enlarged digitally through Raman spectroscopy, the measurement of the intensity and wavelength of scattered light from molecules.

Marina then applied a cyanotype printing process, one of the oldest methods of producing imagery with light, placing transparent negatives of these digital images on paper coated with photosensitive emulsion (below), which she exposed to sunlight.

"I chose this technique because it allowed the Sun to reveal the toxic particles on the paper and in this way to be part of the print," Marina told BBC News.

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