Gazing at Science Stars through the Camera’s Lens
An Ansel Adams protégée captures the nature of brilliance as New York’s brightest minds show up for an art opening at which the subject is…them.
Published September 12, 2005
By Adrienne J. Burke
The confluence of science and art has been a recurring theme for more than 20 years in The New York Academy of Sciences’ lobby gallery. But the exhibit that opened here last week takes a further leap: scientists are the art.
On Friday evening, Sept. 9, more than 100 guests mingled with photographer Mariana Cook and 11 of her scientist-subjects at the opening reception of Faces of Science, an exhibition of photographs drawn from Cook’s new book by the same name, published by Norton.
Her coffee-table collection, dedicated “to those who ask why,” contains portraits of 78 accomplished scientists, each of whom penned an accompanying personal essay describing, variously, how they became interested in science, how they chose their field, or what life lessons their work has taught them. Among them are the chairman and 46 members of The New York Academy of Sciences.
Cook, the last protégée of Ansel Adams whose earlier work includes the portrait collections Fathers and Daughters and Mothers and Sons, said she attempted “to humanize scientists in a way not done before.” She began capturing them on film —black-and-white, natural light, no flash —in the early 1990s. With guidance from the late Scientific American publisher Gerard Piel, Cook invited prominent researchers, including 28 Nobel laureates, to sit before her camera.
At Twilight
As models, Cook said, scientists are unruffled. “They’re direct, they don’t waste time, and they give freely of themselves,” she said. For the Nobelists in the group, perhaps, a photo shoot was nothing new. James Watson, who sported a sailing cap for the reception, said the image of him seated in a fur-lined leather jacket projects one of his more “somber” moments. “I look as if I’m contemplating twilight,” Watson mused, adding, “but then, at times you are contemplating twilight.”
In fact, Cook captured several of her subjects at the twilight of their lives; six have since died, including Watson’s former collaborator Francis Crick, who peers from the composition’s opening page like a wizard, perched in his wife’s fanback wicker chair. The collection concludes with the ear-to-ear grin of 81-year-old Freeman Dyson, whose essay recalls the secret childhood game he played when he was neither sleepy enough to nap nor big enough to climb out of his crib: he calculated infinite series of fractions in his head.
On the pages in between are delightful and surprising shots of luminaries such as National Medal of Science winner C.R. Rao, of “Cramer-Rao inequality” statistical theory, sitting barefoot in a suit and tie on his sofa; Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center President Harold Varmus in Lycra biking shorts and a sweat-stained tee-shirt; maize evolution researcher Mary Eubanks peeking between cornstalks; and Harvard sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson, sitting on a pile of fallen leaves in scuffed walking shoes and white tube socks.
How Laureates Approach Things
Biophysicist Rod MacKinnon took in the art opening with his Rockefeller University lab-mate and wife, Alice, who said she appreciated the way Cook captured her husband’s “intensity.” MacKinnon who seemed unconcerned with locating his own picture in the show, said he enjoyed the way each essay in the book reveals something about the nature of its author.
“I like to see how other scientists such as Hans Bethe (who won a Nobel for discovering how stars emit light) approached things,” MacKinnon said. “You want to know how they approach life. Science is not just collecting and tabulating data. There’s a big human element.”
Columbia University neurobiology professor and Nobelist Eric Kandel said he had read the book cover-to-cover and found Cook’s portrait of him — pensive, hands folded, in his trademark bow-tie — to be “the most unusually interesting photograph” of himself. Too modest to hang it on its own, however, Kandel said that at home he paired the portrait in a diptych with another that Cook made of his wife.
Wooly-Headed Humans
Other New York science stars who stopped by the Academy to gaze upon themselves and their colleagues were physicist Janet Conrad, cell biologist James Darnell, Nobel laureate Paul Greengard, astronomer David Helfand, Earth scientist Lynn Sykes, paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall, and genetic scientist and human genome project founder Norton Zinder.
Noting in his essay how his own career broke from convention, Caltech President David Baltimore, pictured in a Greek fisherman’s cap and scarf, wrote: “Scientists are supposed to be wooly-headed nerds who eschew dealing with real-world issues.”
Whether Faces of Science debunks that stereotype is for the viewer to decide. But at least one of Cook’s subjects embraces wooly-headedness in its most literal sense. In his autobiographical detail, Columbia University astronomy professor David Helfand confesses that he recently threw a party to celebrate having gone 31 years and 8 months (exactly 1 billion seconds) without shaving. Of his portrait, in an elegant pin-stripe suit and white shirt, his wife said, “he’s never looked so good.”
The Faces of Science exhibit runs through October 14 at the New York Academy of Sciences’ Gallery of Art and Science at 2 E. 63rd St.
Also read: Art and Science at the Academy
