Aesthetically Pleasing Science to Hang in Living Room

Who knew Scotch tape, yeast, and ferrofluid could look so cool?

Published January 1, 2006

By Adrienne J. Burke

Let’s get something straight right now. Felice Frankel is not an artist, and the collection of 30 strangely beautiful images hanging in the gallery at NYU’s Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimo in Greenwich Village this month is not art. It’s science.

Any visitor to the “Felice Frankel: Visions of Science” exhibit would beg to differ, but the photographer herself, trained as a biologist, is insistent. “You might think this is art, but it’s pure science,” she says. “I’m revealing the beauty that’s already there.”

Science that’s aesthetically pleasing enough to hang in your living room? You bet. One image, for instance, is a Georgia O’Keeffe-esque black and white portrait of a yeast colony that looks more like a pansy in bloom (Yeast Flower). The only artistic license taken was a Photoshop removal of the underlying petri dish. Another captivating photo, taken with a digital camera and a 105 mm macro lens, is a drop of magnetite suspended in oil (Ferrofluid). Forced by magnets beneath a glass slide to separate into channels, with vibrant orange, yellow, blue, and green hues it resembles an aboriginal mask, or the inside of a pomegranate, depending on your point of view.

“Science is pretty gorgeous,” Frankel says. “I’m not doing anything unusual here.”

Carving Out a Nano-Niche

Well, that last point is debatable too. Frankel, who had a prolific career as a landscape photographer before returning at mid-life to her first love, the research laboratory, has carved out a unique niche for herself ever since her first scientific photograph graced the cover of Science in 1992.

Today she’s employed in MIT’s School of Science and is sought out by researchers worldwide to capture for publication images of their current projects. Among those whose research is represented in the Casa Italiana exhibit are scientists from Brandeis, Harvard, Lehigh University, MIT, University of California at Davis, University of Chicago, and Washington University.

In addition to Science, Frankel’s work has appeared in the journals and magazines Nature, Cellular Biology, Discover, and Technology Review.

She has also published two books of scientific photography — On the Surface of Things: Images of the Extraordinary in Science, a collaborative effort with Harvard biochemist George Whitesides (Chronicle Books, 1997); and Envisioning Science: The Design and Craft of the Science Image (MIT Press, 2002) — and she is at work on a third, again with Whitesides, No Small Matter, to be published next year (Harvard University Press, 2007).

Frankel’s excitement about the science she’s illustrating is contagious. She’s made it her mission to help communicate and clarify science by visually representing the discoveries made through experimentation. “If these images encourage non-scientists to look at science in a different way, and to investigate and understand more about our world, then I will have been successful,” she says. As if to emphasize her point that this is not art, Frankel urges viewers to note the names and laboratories of the scientists whose work they’re witnessing.

High Tech Tools

To be sure, Frankel’s tools are not those of a typical photographer. She captures her often microscopic subjects with 105 mm macroscopic camera lenses, stereomicroscopes, optical microscopes, scanning electron micrographs, and flatbed scanners, not to mention glass slides and petri dishes.

In fact, many of her pieces technically can’t be called photography. Because photons or optical equipment won’t produce pictures of objects such as nanowires that are smaller than the wavelength of light, Frankel uses electrons to depict them in a digital image.

To capture the spectacular fiber-optic-like structural qualities of a 12-cm-long sea creature, Euplectella, Frankel placed the organism’s skeleton on her flatbed scanner.

A color-emphasizing microscopy technique resulted in a picture as pretty as a watercolor painting when Frankel used it to capture an adhesion experiment in which a piece of clear Scotch tape was pulled away from a plastic substrate under a microscope (Adhesion).

And to illustrate an experiment in which calcite crystals were nucleated on a patterned surface, Frankel manipulated the colors and tone of an image obtained via scanning electron micrograph (Joanna’s Calcite).

Unadulterated Science

Whether, or how much, such manipulation degrades the scientific integrity of the images is a question that Frankel and the scientists for whom she works frequently debate. “If the science is about the way the calcite is arranged, then I’m not doing anything wrong there, but we can argue that,” she says.

Even the seemingly benign Photoshop elimination of a petri dish can be controversial, Frankel says. Some scientists argue that the substrate should be visible so the viewer can see the scale. Others would permit that to be explained in a caption.

Frankel suggests that as technology for image making becomes more and more sophisticated, the scientific journals will need to publish separate methodologies for how images have been made. And she’s cautious about the pitfalls of ever more sophisticated imaging technologies. For instance, she says, viewing a scientific process in real time on film isn’t necessarily preferable to contemplating still images. “I wonder sometimes if we’re too engaged in animation. I think that there are certain moments we can get more out of if we reflect on one still image,” she says.

Visions of Science is on display through February 17 at the Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimo, 24 W. 12th St. between Fifth and Sixth Aves. The US tour of the exhibit is presented by Italian biomedical imaging and diagnostics company, Bracco, which also sponsored a recent tour of Frankel’s work in Italy. From New York, Visions of Science will travel to Minneapolis.

Also read: An Academy Member’s Work in Prime Time