Christine Lorenz uses the tools of macro photography to reflect on the ways we find meaning in materials. Through photographs of salt, plastics, and light, Lorenz literally and figuratively provides new perspectives of seeing and appreciating the world around us. Lorenz earned her MFA at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and BA at The Ohio State University. Her photographs have been seen at photo-eye gallery, Santa Fe; PEP, Berlin; Brooklyn Waterfront Arts Coalition; Silver Eye Center for Photography; and at unconventional spaces in her hometown of Pittsburgh PA. Online, her photographs have been featured by Der Greif, Lenscratch, Vice, Fraction Magazine, Rogue Agent Journal, Magenta Foundation and Humble Arts Foundation. She was a 2025 Gilbert Fellow at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Her article “Halophilic” was published in Refract Journal, a peer-reviewed journal from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2022. She was a selected photographer for Review Santa Fe in 2021 and was a finalist for Photolucida Critical Mass in 2023. In addition to self-publishing photobooks, she works as a founding member of Flock Artist Collective, cultivating the intertwined work of artmaking and parenting. She teaches art writing and the history of photography at Duquesne University and Point Park University. Artist Statement The Halophilic series comes from a process of attunement with common materials, through methods that dodge some of the limits of human perception. The photographs here depict salt crystals, illuminated with polarized light, which is filtered through layers of transparent, discarded plastics. In the process, salt and plastics collaborate in refraction, creating shimmering constellations and gravity-defying spaces that evade a sense of scale.The term “halophilic” describes the elements of a saline ecosystem. While we know salt to be a material of the earth, it tends to reach us as an endproduct of industrial-scale extraction. In a broader scale, the life cycle of salt is entangled with that of petroleum. These materials are part of our world at every level, from the geological to the the most minuscule we can imagine. Both of these materials are key components in photography’s history. We are culturally and physically enmeshed with these substances, as we participate in a process of transformation that reaches far beyond what we can sense. What kind of poetics can the medium draw from a world that is infused with plastics at every level? What kind of stories could possibly fit the world we’re creating now?I began using the tools of macro photography with plastics and salt in 2014. I have worked with salt that I’ve collected from a range of sources, including a mine in Utah, a historic works in West Virginia, recreational locations, and sources intended for laboratory use. In the bigger picture, these materials are of use to human beings only briefly, before being cast back out again -- whether to recombine with the elements of the world, or degrade into pieces that will disperse far beyond where they can be brought back. The act of photographing them together is a human action, grasping at a moment in time.