Frankel photos

Today's New York Times has a great article on the science images of Felice Frankel. I had the privilege of hearing her speak several years ago at one of the Kern conferences on visual rhetoric at Rochester Institute of Technology. At the time I was both impressed by her images and also a bit frustrated by what I interpreted as her relative lack of interest in discussing the "constructed" nature of her images. It was clear then that she had, and according to the Times piece still has, a vested interest in making sure that people understand that she works closely with scientists to create images that do not "distort" the science. But in an audio narration that accompanies several of her images on the Times site, Frankel does note in passing that at times her imaging choices help scientists to see the science differently. So while Frankel denies that her photographs are "art" or "ideology" in the opening paragraphs of the article, she does seem to have become more comfortable with the idea that her images don't just represent science, they help to make it, too.

And they are just plain visually stunning to boot.

Comments

[Sara]

How interesting to get a rhetorician's take on this! I read that article in the NYT online (I didn't read the audio narration, though; I'll have to go back and do that.) Her images are lovely.

As for her past attitude toward the constructed nature of her images, I wonder if it came from a desire to be accepted in the scientific community. I can imagine that there might have been a perception amongst scientists that any manipulation of the images is akin to manipulating data.

[caraf]

I think you're exactly right, Sara. She hints in the article that she encountered early resistance to her work. I find something interesting (and ideological) in the impulse to make certain kinds of "beautiful" images in the first place (e.g., the Scientific American cover kind of image). The art historian James Elkins talks about this a bit in his work, but the very act of making the unfamiliar "familiar" (yeast as a flower, for example) does something to our relationship to science. It educates and hopefully interests people in science, but it also aestheticizes science according to particular norms re: what's "beautiful", etc. Fun stuff to think about.