"You're an artist & I'm a geologist. Let's see what happens when a scientist & an artist collaborate & what they can come up with," Dr. Susumu Honjo, a Senior Scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution told me when I fist moved to Cape Cod.

Sus was researching microscopic sea organisms & the effects of increased greenhouse gases on marine life. I was exploring the nature of photography.

Sus & his colleagues were using a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) to learn about radiolaria, coccoliths, & diatoms. Sus told me I could use his archive of SEM negatives to play with. I wanted to make photographs that were as soft, wet, diaphanous, irregular in outline, and sculptural as the swimming sea creatures Sus was studying.

I explored the basement of the Marine Biological Lab & found some old hand-blown glass containers about to be discarded. I found formulas for photographic emulsions in 19^th c. books at the MBL library. I began to experiment with silver nitrate, gelatin, & organic chemicals. Instead of putting my hand-made light sensitive emulsions onto a stiff paper surface, I poured them onto waxed paper. I exposed them to light under enlarged negatives I made from Sus' SEM images.

Then I floated the membrane-like photographs in water in the glass containers. I had created an image of a radiolarian that swam in water like the creature itself. My first show of this work was called "The Dissolution of a Coccolith, or the Birth of a Photographic Idea."

I was pregnant with my youngest daughter at the time. These floating emulsions, I call them "Galleggianti" — Italian for things that float — felt to me to be like embryos.

I returned to my studies with Sonia Landy Sheridan, my mentor at the Generative Systems Department of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I did a series of self-portraits, nudes, and images of the fetal heartbeat of my unborn child. Cheered on by Sonia, I used copy machines, the original Xerox Haloid machine, ultra-sound microphones, and the proto-Photoshop Sandine Image Processor to make negatives that I transferred to my gelatin emulsions. I call this my Placenta Series.

I have bags of these three-dimensional emulsions in my basement. Left too long in water, they indeed become alive — with mold. Not the kind of life I wanted to image. Dried, they look like shrunken heads. But after 15 minutes in water, they are as graceful as jellyfish.

I am grateful to Dr. Susumu Honjo for opening up new imaging possibilities. I will forever love Sonia Landy Sheridan for her unending inspiration & for her challenge to me to re-invent photography & make it ever more human.