40X Roma al Microscopio: behind the scenes of the exhibition event

As has been the case for several editions now, Chirale is Official Partner of the prestigious Open House Roma festival, which this year takes place over the weekend of 2 and 3 October.

Once again, we have not limited ourselves to supporting and backing this major celebration of design and architecture in the Capital, but together with Davide Paterna, Director of Open House Roma, we wanted to produce and curate one of its most significant events.

40X Roma al Microscopio is an unconventional photographic exhibition that allows visitors to observe the city through the lens of a microscope, away from the usual clichés. The Capital is analysed as a living organism, made of tissues, pulsations, cycles and mutations.

The exhibition is set up in the spaces of the Gimema Foundation, an important research centre on the front line in the fight against blood diseases, which chose the former Pastificio Pantanella as its headquarters and as a space for sharing and exchanging with the city.

Six beautiful Zeiss microscopes, kindly provided by Micro Lab Equipment, will allow visitors to observe — in an unexpected and evocative way — six images created from the shots of photographers Carola Gatta, Emiliano Zandri and the Roma Fotografia cultural association.

Two images for each author, for an unexpected and wonderful vision of the city of Rome.

The emotional impact of the exhibition is guaranteed, but how did we go about creating this original installation?

In this article we will tell you in detail about the entire process — a set of procedures based largely on very analog and craft technologies.

First of all, we asked the three selected authors to provide us with high-resolution digital files of the photographs they had taken, interpreting the concept of the exhibition.

We then printed the six images using digital ink-jet fine-art technology, with an Epson 3880 printer, Hahnemuhle Bright White paper and K3 pigment inks — basically MOMA-exhibition stuff!

Using fine-art technologies with substrates from the famous German paper mill that has been supplying pure cotton paper to the world’s best artists since 1584 was an essential step to have an image source with the best possible resolution and colour rendering, given the stress that the optical ultra-reduction process would entail.

The prints were mounted on medium-grey cardboard — the same used for calibrating exposure meters — and photographed in full sunlight using an analog Nikon F5 camera, practically the best analog camera of all time, and Fuji Velvia 50 ISO film, the same used by generations of photographers who published in National Geographic.

Since we had no idea how the optical reduction of the image would render on Fuji Velvia 50 film once observed under the microscope, we made 6 different photographic shots for each image, preferring an 80 mm. F1.4 fixed-focal-length Nikon optical lens set at aperture F8, varying the distance from the target by moving the tripod rather than using a zoom lens that would inevitably have had worse resolution.

The film, after being exposed, was loaded into a development tank using the “shirt” sleeve that allows safe operation under ambient light.

For film development we preferred to use the E6 process in the original 6-bath version originally patented by Kodak. Most amateur analog photographers use the more modern 3-bath kit produced by Tetenal because it is faster and simpler and able to provide excellent results for conventional uses of slides — i.e. projection or digital scanning — but in our case we would observe a small portion of the slide at 40× magnification and we could not afford even the slightest loss of quality.

Fortunately, the Italian chemical company Bellini produces and markets an E6 kit in the original formulation. We in particular used the product branded and distributed by our friends at Ars Imago.

To rigorously control the process — which in colour analog photography is extremely critical and sensitive even to variations of a few tenths of a degree in temperature — we used our Jobo CPE-3 processor.

The entire cycle of 6 chemical baths, plus about 8 washing and stabilisation cycles, takes about 45 minutes. With great patience we prepared the solutions using precision dispensers and a great deal of skill.

Fuji Velvia 50 is a colour reversal film — that is, a film that delivers images directly as positives, unlike conventional negative films that produce inverted-luminance images intended for analog photographic prints.

When digital photography did not exist, professional photographers and reporters preferred reversal films because they had higher quality and were intended for scanning for publication in magazines or books. Direct viewing of slides happens by projection or through a dedicated magnifying viewer.

In our case we needed a positive to observe directly under the microscope.

Unlike the chemical process for developing black-and-white films, which allows wide margins of error, colour development is very critical. Any error can destroy the quality of the entire roll.

But we are very good and the development gave a perfect result on the first attempt!

Once the roll had been dried, we observed the various frames under the microscope at 40×.

For each photograph produced by the authors, we had 6 frames available with the image at different sizes, varying from the image filling the entire frame (24 × 36 mm.) to the image framed from afar covering an area of about 1/4 of the frame (4 × 6 mm.) leaving grey background on the rest.

With some surprise and a good dose of jubilation, we noted that, even in the most reduced version, all the details of the original photograph were perfectly legible. The combination of the best analog photographic equipment ever produced by humankind, the best colour slide film of all time, and our unparalleled mastery in dominating processes (Chirale where process matters more than outcome) had worked!

At this point all we had to do was select the frames with the greatest reduction of the original image, very carefully cut out the useful portion of the image and mount everything on microscope slides, simulating biological samples to be studied.

We packaged the work of the three authors in a cardboard packaging made with our laser cutter and our digital labelling machine, and shipped everything to the GIMEMA Foundation for the exhibition setup.