The Eyes Have It

Some people are born with an eye for art. Patrick Saine makes art out of eyes. Saine, the director of ophthalmic photography at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and a passionate photographer, combines his profession with his obsession by turning mundane photographs of patients retinas into kaleidoscopic works of art. Saine, who was an artistic photographer long before he became an ophthalmic photographer, routinely juggles several creative projects at once. "I like to work on many artistic projects at a time and find out which ones are going to evolve into something bigger and which ones might die out," he says. His job at DHMC inspired his eye art and allowed him to focus on his creativity even while at work. When I came to Dartmouth, I started seeing my work in a different light, he says. At the ophthalmic clinic, Saine uses a special instrument called a fundus camera to take a close-up image of the human eye to diagnose retinal damage or other eye disorders. That's where his job ends and the artwork begins. Saine then selects from

the more than 1,000 retinal pictures he shoots each week, choosing images that have a certain artistic quality. "I look at hundreds of pictures every day and some of them just jump out at me," he says. Using image-editing software, Saine manipulates the photographs by layering and stitching them together to create what he calls a "digital quilt.' The quilts, some of which can be seen on Saine's Web site ( www.pjsaine.com), take up to 40 hours to com plete. One of his larger works, a 3-by-5-foot print of his Fundus Flag, hangs on the waiting room wall outside his office at the medical center. The picture, an American flag made entirely out of retinal photographs, seems to stare back at waiting patients. • The art world has taken notice of Saine's work. He has earned several awards at the "Eye as Art show at the annual Ophthalmic Photographers' Society meeting, and his eye pieces have been displayed at the Contempo Gallery in St. Augustine, Florida. "To photograph the eyes," says Saine, "is the ultimate self-referential act."

Unfolding Fundus, retinal artwork by Patrick Saine