Recently I found myself down the most amazing rabbit hole and discovered the incredible German graphic designer and self-taught photographer, Carl Strüwe.  His work is a black and white treasure of textured detail and delicate organic beauty.  If it hadn't been for Carl I would never have come to appreciate the unlikely beauty of a cockroach's stomach.  And beautiful it truly is.... 

When reading about Carl this is what I found interesting.

If you think about how we view art, it is usually through the gaze of a 'frame'.  We would traditionally expect to see a square or rectangle, a canvas shape.  The images Carl was seeing through the microscope were framed in a circular way, the image cropped by the round lens.

But Carl had an artists eye and realised in order to separate the cockroach from the 'glass slide of science' and instead elevate its beauty for a gallery wall he would need to 'reframe' the images.   

Today, we would simply select the crop tool on our computer and et voila!  But not for Carl.  He took little cardboard cutouts and placed them over the glass slides under the microscope lens, framing the subject with an angled shape, a square or rectangle.  The camera was then positioned to be looking down the viewfinder of the microscope.   The end result, beauty in its purest, most detailed, god touched form. 

If you want to learn a little bit more about Carl Strüwe then you can read more about him here and here and here.  I found him fascinating, maybe you will too.

Images and title credit - hyperallergic.com