Since the 1980s, the collaborative artists (and twins) Doug and Mike Starn have montaged photographs of iconic art subjects into intentionally fragmented, fragile exposures. To create this ethereal image of a large wooden Bodhisattva at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, they chose the delicate carbon process, developed in the mid-19th century. The layers of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (carbon) pigments fuse together to build the image, reflecting the artists’ hope to relay an “idea of interdependence.” The Starns find inspiration in the Buddhist concept of impermanence (anitya), explaining: “Everything is made up of parts, and is dependent on the right conditions for its existence. Everything is in constant flux.”

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