Transitioning – Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table through Tex Bishop’s eyes

Just like a chemist in a laboratory, the photographer recreates a human experience bringing to life his own experiment

The photoshoot is based around Primo Levi’s short story Hydrogen from his book The Periodic Table. In the book, a sixteen-year-old Levi, along with a friend, borrows his older brother’s home laboratory to conduct an experiment to create hydrogen from water and a battery: electrolysis. They succeed, and Levi convinces his once skeptical friend that the experiment was a success by lighting the hydrogen in a jar which then creates a small explosion.

Tex Bishop – The Periodic Table, Hydrogen

They are content at having successfully conducted the experiment.I wanted to create two contrasting set of images: on the one hand the still life images of the chemical experiment and on the other one the images of the two boys, exhilarated at their discovery. The photographic series’ aim is to convey the sense of delight and energy that comes across in the original text, to speak about a feeling of youthful discovery.

Tex Bishop

Photographer from London. He began to take and print his own pictures, later working in a color darkroom. Bishop spent a year and a half assisting the photographer Jamie Hawkesworth before going on to work independently. Since then, he has been working on commissions and long-term projects.

Photography Tex Bishop

Editorial Team