NewsLatin AmericaThe photographer who saw the universe in her father's ashes

The photographer who saw the universe in her father’s ashes

When the photographer Gabriela Reyes Fuchs put her eye under the microscope to see her father’s ashes, she felt her head split and she gasped. Behind a magnified dark particle, the glow peeked out as in an eclipse and the background turned from yellow to orange to red. “I had just lost one of the pillars of my existence, and suddenly I saw so much light I didn’t understand what was happening, there was no one who knew why this was happening,” she says. Before she put the milligrams of ash under the microscope, scientists had warned her that the image she would see would be monochrome, in whites, blacks, and grays. But instead, that colored nebula appeared.

The father of Reyes Fuchs (Mexico City, 36 years old) had passed away two weeks before and she instinctively felt the need to see the ashes under the lens of a microscope. Scientists close to her – her uncles are physicists, biologists, geneticists – helped her access the tool she needed to make her own observation and those images appeared on her first attempt. “What I discovered for me was a watershed and changed my entire understanding of the universe, of life, death,” he says at home, where he has the nebula he saw printed on pearl paper and framed in the center of one of the walls. on that first observation.

One of Reyes Fuchs’ microscopic photographs.Gabriela Reyes Fuchs

It was 2012. He first sought a grant to continue his research and then created a video installation, dead soon, with photos and recordings of his father’s ashes, which was exhibited in Mexico, Canada and the United States. A video of him went viral and different people began to write to him because they also wanted images of the ashes of his loved ones. So he patented the scientific process that allows him to see fluorescence in ashes and created a company, Innerstela, which today has five employees.

Reyes Fuchs does not offer too many details about the method, but explains that “it has to do with the type of microscope” and assures that it is “a unique discovery.” “Something that I have always wanted to clarify is that no, I am not seeing your aura. It is a scientific methodology to see something”, warns the photographer.

To get a photo, customers must hand over two milligrams of ash which they later retrieve. Reyes Fuchs puts them under the microscope and observes them until he finds the best frame. “That’s my input as an artist, that’s where my eye is. It is the only artistic thing that it has”, says the photographer. It can then spend up to five hours “cleaning the photos” of small particles, dead pixels, that appear in the image. There is no more edition than that. In the end, the image is printed on a special paper that has museum quality and is delivered along with a certificate of authenticity.

Another of the nebulae made from ashes.
Another of the nebulae made from ashes.Gabriela Reyes Fuchs

Reyes Fuchs only does one sample per day. The images obtained, he explains, are all different from each other, like fingerprints, and he sells them for $1,600 plus VAT. The photographer explains that when someone cannot pay that price, she looks for “ways to sponsor them.” Her goal is for the company to grow in order to “reach communities” and help them grieve through art. It would be “a dream,” she says, to be able to work with war victims or relatives of missing persons. Now, for example, she is preparing a series made from the ashes of endangered animals. 100% of what she collects from the auction of these images will go to different organizations that work to protect and conserve wildlife.

“We are all made of the same”

The photographer believes that if no one has ever seen colors in the ashes of buried people or animals, it is because of the “taboo” that exists around death. “They took it for granted that ashes look black, white and gray. No one else set out to investigate other ways of observing them,” she notes. The photographer tells that she spent many years doing research at universities, counting electrons, observing the morphology of particles with electric microscopes. “I was very obsessed with understanding the data issues behind it, but I realized that I was getting away from the essence,” she says.

The essence, she explains, “were all the emotions and all the connection” that she felt when she put her eye under the microscope the first time, and that she noticed “that it was being replicated in each of the people” who asked her for a photograph. For the artist, everything had started “to try to understand a little more about death.” “We all have a different duel. But everyone feels something very nice [al ver las imagenes], which is such an awesome feeling of reconnection. In these moments of humanity it is what we need ”.

The container where Innerstela's clients send their ashes.
The container where Innerstela’s clients send their ashes.Monica Gonzalez Islands

Reyes Fuchs says that when he shows the results to scientists, the answer they give him is that his work is “visual proof that we are made of stars.” The idea was expressed in 1929 by the American astronomer Harlow Shapley (“We, the organic beings who call ourselves human beings, are made of the same matter as the stars”) and was later popularized by the popularizer Carl Sagan (“We are made of dust of stars” or “We are made of star stuff”). Beyond poetry, the phrase summarizes a certainty: that the basic components that make up all living beings on Earth –carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, iron, etc.– are manufactured inside the stars.

“We are all made of the same, everything is made of the same”, says the photographer. For Reyes Fuchs, seeing the ashes of deceased people look like fluorescent nebulae under a microscope “feels like belonging.” “Sometimes we need to feel that as humans, that we belong to this universe,” she says. “Of course nothing is going to take away the pain of missing someone. Of course I miss my dad. But he comes with more joy, ”says the photographer, who celebrates being able to accompany other people in their duels:“ he is super beautiful, he makes me continue ”.

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