He is obsessive, meticulous and rigorous. In his Matrix series, however, he has somehow merged the two approaches outlined above: the rigorously formal with the luminously observational. Whereas the likes of Blossfeldt and the Bechers created visual typologies, arranging plants and industrial water towers respectively in grids that echo the natural and man-made sameness of their subjects, Catlin has used the grid format to render a series of what he calls “critical” moments. The resulting images are both formally detached and acutely observational, ordered yet intimate. Their intimacy is amplified by the cumulative power of each arrangement of critical moments into a matrix of observation.