“Mom” from the series Heat, Portraits of the Invisible World

Linda Alterwitz uses different technologies to go behind the surfaces of bodies and landscapes, inviting the viewer to imagine them in unfamiliar ways. She often draws on the languages of medicine and science, reimagining diagnostic imagery such as MRI scans. This artwork comes from Heat, an ongoing (2016–present) series of portrait photographs shot with a high-resolution thermal camera. “The thermal camera enables me to present an alternate vision of what a portrait can be … having stripped the markers that trigger habitual responses,” she explains.

The subjects of the Heat portraits range in age from very young children to her elderly mother, but Alterwitz proposes that they are fundamentally the same. “Pigmentation, tattoos, hair color cease to exist. Marks and wrinkles on the skin often disappear. The depth of field and three-dimensional object are flattened, and the figure comes to the forefront, often isolated in space, floating in nothingness, the absence of gravity. It’s disorienting. It’s not clear where the surfaces are. The images don’t connect to previous assumptions. Instead, radiating from each portrait are the biological commonalities that unite us—breath, sweat, inflammation, and the warm circulation of blood.”