Nick Veasey: Exposing the invisible

Nick Veasey shows outsized X-ray images that reveal the otherworldly inner workings of familiar objects -- from the geometry of a wildflower to the anatomy of a Boeing 747. Producing these photos is dangerous and painstaking, but the reward is a superpower: looking at what the human eye can't see.

Logging countless hours behind an X-ray machine, Nick Veasey illuminates the labyrinthine secrets hidden beneath the exteriors of everyday objects.

Why you should listen to him:

Toiling over 14-inch sheets of X-ray film in a hangar in Kent, photographer Nick Veasey has revealed the shadowy interiors of objects as diverse as vacuum tubes, bulldozers, jet airliners -- even fresh cadavers. By his own estimates, he's photographed thousands of everyday items, often arranging them into tableaux that are at the same time familiar and luminously alien. They reveal surprising details and prove that items have an inner beauty.

His book X-Ray: See Through the World Around You showcases dozens of these photographs. Despite the painstakingly technical nature of the medium (an image of a Boeing 777 required a patchwork of 500 exposures), they radiate from the page with stunning, phantasmagorical delicacy.

"Not many photographers need a linear accelerator. But Nick Veasey isn't your average shutterbug. Instead of tweaking f-stops and light boxes, he fine-tunes the speed and frequency of energy pulses emitted by a Russian-made tabletop particle turbocharger."

Lucas Graves, Wired