The Art of Photography Applied as a Scientific Tool
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The Art of Photography Applied as a Scientific Tool the artistic medium of photography as a Art and science each have their own scientific tool. distinct vocabularies, a set of terms that The ghostly traces left behind by the only those within the field can (or want movement of latex spheres in Xiaoli Li’s to) understand. But for all the insider jar(University of Southampton, UK) scangon that artists and scientists use to ning electron microscope (SEM) image describe their work, practitioners in both create an intriguing scene that hovers fields also employ a language that is unibetween abstraction and representation. versal—they depend on the visual to Though the shadowy grayscale and comcommunicate otherwise impossible-toplete lack of depth gives us few visual visualize processes and phenomenon. clues as to what we are looking at, we It was these commonalities that we read into the image a row of plants or found most striking about the Science as trees, a fence-like structure, a scattering of Art exhibition on view at the 2008 fireflies or stars. A dreamlike quality perMaterials Research Society Spring vades the work, reminiscent of the Meeting in San Francisco. Here was a group of scientists who realized the aesthetic value of the images they were creating, and not just as passive agents documenting what they saw under the microscope, in the service of proving or disproving a hypothesis. These scientists/artists enhanced and stretched and played with the image’s connection to reality—which, to the untrained eye looking at the nanosphere, is surreal enough to begin with. We were treated to a Hudson River landscape in microcosm, and nanowire bundles with an uncanny resemblance to the work of Vincent Van Gogh. We saw objects that seemed so far removed from any connection to Ghostly Traces of Latex Spheres real space or volume that they Xiaoli Li’s, University of Southampton, UK become pure abstractions, similar to the “Op Art” of the 1960s. Other pictures would not look out of place among pieces by the community of painters, photographers, filmmakers, architects, and designers at the art school where we study and work—an art historian could classify them as Pop Art, Color Field Painting, early 20th century photograms, Impressionism, and so on. A handful of images of exceptionally high quality stood out from the 50 chosen for the exhibition, and we found two of them to be particularly compelling. We chose these works not for their skillful digital manipulation, or the enhanced intensity of their colors, or for the degree to which they mimic another famous artwork or feature of nature, but rather for the outstanding acuity of their creator’s aesthetic eye Vibrant Burst of Color and a unique approach to using Minrui Yu, University of Wisconsin–Madison 826
Blaschka collection of botany-inspired glass sculpture from the 19th century. We especially admired Li’s decision to leave the image in its original black and white rather than distract the eye with Photoshop tricks. In an era when image-makers have a mind-boggling
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