Fingerprints explores the relationship between people and environment in a series of close-up photographs. Each image captures the unique identifying marks we leave on everything our hands touch: from paper towel dispensers, to wine bottles, to library books. Fingerprints are an enduring legacy of our tactile interactions, however brief, with the objects we encounter. Ohio based artist, Benjamin Montague, Assistant Professor of Photography at Wright University, uses traditional fingerprinting techniques to bring forth the unique signatures we impress upon the world around us, then he photographs them and prints them on sheets of rice paper. The thin, opaque quality of the paper lends his images a ghostly appearance that heightens the sense of their latent qualities: an aspect of the dusting technique of fingerprinting that shares a sensibility with photographic development. Montague has previously explored techniques of direct photography such as tintypes where an image is captured on a metal, film-coated plate. The process of revealing latent fingerprints substitutes impression by light with that of touch. The pits and valleys evident in each print add depth to the images and they begin to take on attributes suggesting landscapes. Montague’s Fingerprint Series explores the dialogues between art and science, micro and macrocosm, the organic and the inorganic, and transient interaction and lasting impression.