Diatoms are single-celled algae. Each one builds itself a shell out of glass.
Not glass as a metaphor. Silica — the same material as a window — assembled into geometric lattices, perforated discs and radial patterns so precise that no two species build the same one. There are tens of thousands of species and every one has its own architecture.
They are roughly one percent of the photosynthetic life on Earth. They drive about forty percent of everything the ocean produces, and somewhere around a fifth of the oxygen made on this planet each year.
One in five breaths
Take five breaths. One of them is theirs.
They are invisible, they are made of glass, they are more beautiful under a microscope than most things are at any scale, and almost nobody has ever seen one.
This is the whole idea
NEOTENE is built on one thesis: the most beautiful things on Earth are the ones nobody looks at closely. We go close enough that the mechanism becomes the picture. One series per organism or structure.
Editions of 25. Then never again.
Large-format archival pigment prints. Numbered, issued with a certificate of authenticity, and never reprinted.
Deliberately unsigned — every piece is entered in a public register instead, so you can see where all twenty-five are in the world at any time. A signature can be forged. A register cannot be quietly rewritten.
The first edition has not released yet
New drops go to the list before they go on sale. One email a month, at most.