If you’re the kind of person who carries hand sanitizer everywhere you go, then you’re aware—maybe too aware—of the colonies of bacteria camped out on everything from gas pumps to ATM machines. Marco Castelli plays to your worst fears in his series A Micro Odyssey.
Oh sure, they look like photographs of distant planets. But they're petri dishes awash in bacteria found in bank terminals, public buses and women's bathrooms, photographed against pictures of the stars. Yet suspended in space, they are surprisingly beautiful. "It’s fantastic to let microorganisms meet stars,” Castelli says.
The Italian photographer came up with the idea last year after seeing a photo of a petri dish and marveling at its resemblance to a planet. He wondered what it might look like if he combined petri dishes with space photos, and tried it in Photoshop using low-resolution images online. He liked what he saw, and started learning how to raise his own cultures.
Castelli started swabbing every surface he could think of—his toothbrush, a doorbell, even a stranger's hand—with cotton swabs, then transferring the bacteria to petri dishes filled with a clear, jelly-like growth medium called agar. After four or five days, the dishes teemed with yellow and brown fungus that smelled “similar to rotten eggs," he says.
He used his Canon 5D Mark III to shoot the petri dishes sitting on top of space photos he found online. Sometimes he would slip circular pieces of paper in various shades of gray beneath a dish to adjust its tone and provide added depth. He made the images black and white in Photoshop and played with the contrast to make the planets pop.
It’s amazing how the petri dishes resemble celestial bodies. Some are covered in bubbles that resemble clouds. Others have veins and webs that look like rivers and mountain ranges. Still others feature blobs that look like powerful storms. While Castelli has no idea what organisms the dishes actually contain, and the titles—Bar Seat, Bank Terminal—reveal their mundane, earthly origins.
Castelli’s point isn’t to gross you out, but to amuse and inspire. His images evoke a sense of mystery and awe, combining the infinitesimal with the infinite. "*A Micro Odyssey *is where fiction runs into reality," he says, "and [where] the infinitely small faces the endless universe."
