In partnership with Paris Photo, bio-tech Abivax – whose research aims to fight against viral and inflammatory diseases – launched in 2018 the first edition of the ABIVAX PHOTO AWARD, a photo contest dedicated to the promotion of the emotional power of medical research. For this first edition, candidates were invited to work around the adjective “vital”.
SMITH wins a prize of 5,000 euros among the 42 applications sent and the photo will be exhibited at the Abivax Photo Award on Thursday, November 8 at 18:30 on the balcony of the Grand Palais as part of Paris Photo.
For SMITH, “the image, extracted from the series” Spectrographs “, is based on the use of a thermal camera, an instrument used in the medical field to” photograph “the heat waves, hypothetically pathogenic, released by the body. The images obtained have fascinating characteristics: the quantity of heat emitted by the different parts of the body of each individual is translated by zones of color.
Each portrait is unique because it depends on the location of the veins, the thickness of the skeleton, the amount of tissue, muscle … the subject photographed. These biometric images thus reveal the body as a set of flows, of vital thermal energies, beyond its envelope. They evoke the spectral, inexplicable je-ne-sais-quoi which characterizes every photographic portrait, and is inscribed in the corporeal, the sensitive, the tactile: the living. ”
