Back Story: Wizards of light
IEEE Spectrum · 2021
When IEEE Spectrum came calling with a tricky assignment for a cover shoot, The Voorhes (Adam Voorhes and Robin Finlay, a married couple known professionally as The Voorhes) found their answer in the shadows. Though the duo specializes in conceptual images and still life photographs that occasionally require blowing things up, this would be a kinder, gentler shoot. The images they would produce would accompany an article about the development of an artificial placenta that could potentially keep extremely premature infants alive. They decided to fashion a fetus cradled in light. And paradoxically, crafting that luminous image required photographing shadows. They placed a glass block adorned with a laser-etched fetus behind a sheet of translucent vellum paper, positioned a light behind the block, and photographed the shadow that it cast on the paper. As they repeated that process with a glass egg and sphere, they added prisms around the objects to catch the light and produce shimmering bright spots. Finally, they layered the individual images to create a composite. The miraculous combination of all this light and trickery graces the cover of this magazine.