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2 ART MEETS SCIENCE

About a half hour’s drive northeast of downtown Washington, D.C., at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Patuxent Wildlife Research

Center, Sam Droege holds court in a lab filled with hundreds of insect specimens neatly pinned in styrofoam-lined boxes. On

any given day, the biologist shares the space with interns under his tutelage and the meticulously classified and catologued

insects.

Some of the insects—wasps, bees, crickets and beetles—Droege collected himself, either near his home in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, or

on the grounds of his lab in Beltsville. Others are sent to him by scientists at the U.S. Forest Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service and

the National Park Service, as well as by researchers and students from other institutions.

Droege is tasked with photographing the different species, and his images appear in guides, identification manuals, posters and power

point presentations used by the USGS. The publications, Droege explains in an email, “illustrate everything from the general look and

feel of a species to the intricate details of their legs, mandibles and integument.”

Biologist Sam Droege’s sharply-focused photographs of bees, used for identifying different species, make for fine art

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Bee-utiful!The Stinging Insect Gets a Close-Up

ART MEETS SCIENCE 3

To ensure that his subjects don’t have mangled wings or matted

fur (“There is nothing worse than a bee with bad hair!” he says),

Droege takes bees stored in water, alcohol or glycol, puts them

in a canning jar with a screen top, washes them in warm water

with splash of dish soap and rinses off the suds. He then dries the

specimens with a hair dryer. No need to be gentle, he explains in

instructional videos on YouTube. The bees are hardy.

His close-ups of bees magnify the specimens anywhere from

one to five times their true size. At this rate, a viewer is privy to

all details one would see under a microscope. “An illustration of

the magnification?” says Droege. “Our biggest problem is tiny

specs of dust that show up on all these specimens that have to

be photoshopped out, but normally would never be seen.” The

photographer can print the images large-scale, about 5-by-8 feet,

without them pixelating.

Droege has a queue of about 500 pictures vying for his attention.

He will edit them in photoshop and eventually post them to his

Flickr site, a virtual museum of sorts for both science and arts

enthusiasts. The biologist certainly has a flair for the artistic.

He chooses to display the bees on stark black backgrounds, as

opposed to white or gray, to avoid the distraction of brightness.

“The insects themselves come with palettes of color that are

naturally balanced, harmonious and draw you in,” says Droege.

“The level of detail of the pictures and the offset flash lighting

pops the small surface features, making visible what normally

gets lost in lower resolution shots, and provides the depth and

contrasts of sculptures and oil paints.”

I can’t resist saying it: The photographs are bee-utiful!

As I write this, Droege has 1,236 photos uploaded to his Flickr

photostream, a number that grows by the day, and about 75

percent of those images are of bees.

Droege leads the USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab. In this

role, he has been documenting many of the 4,000 species of bees

in North America, so that he and his colleagues can first accurately

identify individual bees and then track fluctuations in different

species’ populations. As many media outlets have reported,

bee populations have collapsed for any number of supposed

reasons—climate change, parasites, disease or our pesticide use in

agriculture.

To properly identify different species based, “We needed some

good pictures,” he recently told NPR. “We really high-definition

pictures that people can drill into and say, ‘You know the pattern

of the crosshatching between the pits on the skin of the upper part

of the bee is really different than this one.’”

Droege riffs off a technique pioneered by the Army’s public health

lab. The Army took detailed photographs of insects capable of

carrying human diseases and other pests on remote military

bases and sent them to entomologists around the world for

confirmation, he explains. With a $8,000 getup, including a

camera, a 60 mm macro lens, a flash, a StackShot rail to ensure

highly detailed images and special software, Droege takes multiple

shots at different distances from a bee and then stitches the

images together to create one sharply-focused portrait.

4 ART MEETS SCIENCE

Artist Lisa Nilsson creates elaborate anatomical illustrations from thin strips of paper


Slice of LifeArtistic Cross Sections of the Human Body

Lisa Nilsson was on an antiquing

trip three or four years ago when

a gilt crucifix caught her eye. The

cross was crafted using a Renaissance-

era technique called quilling, where thin

paper is rolled to form different shapes and

patterns.

“I thought it was really beautiful, so I made

a couple of small, abstract gilt pieces,” says

Nilsson, an artist based in North Adams,

Massachusetts. She incorporated these first

forays in quilling into her mixed media

assemblages.

Almost serendipitously, as Nilsson was

teaching herself to mold and shape the

strips of Japanese mulberry paper, a friend

sent her a century-old, hand-colored

photograph of a cross section of a human

torso from a French medical book. “I have

always been interested in scientific and

biological imagery,” says the artist. “This

image was really inspiring.”

In the cross section, Nilsson saw many

of the shapes that she had already

been coiling and building. The quilling

technique, she thought, with its “squeezing

shapes into a cavity,” certainly lent itself

to her subject matter. She could make tiny

tubes and squish them together to fill the

many different spaces in the body—lungs,

vertebrae, pelvic bones and muscles.

Her first anatomical paper sculpture,

Female Torso (shown at top), is a near-

direct translation of the French medical

image.

Nilsson went on to create an entire Tissue

Series, which offers artistic slices, literally,

of male and female bodies: a cross section

of a head at eye level, another of a chest

just above a man’s arm pits and one of an

abdomen at navel height, to name a few.

Nilsson began exhibiting her paper

sculptures at galleries and museums.

“The two words that I heard most often to

describe the work were ‘beautiful,’ which

is always nice to hear, and…’creepy,’ ”

she said in a talk at TEDMED, an annual

conference focusing on health and

medicine. The artist admits that she never

found the project disturbing. “I was so

enthralled with the aesthetic possibilities

I saw in cross sections, I had kind of

overlooked the idea that viewing the body

in this sort of ‘slice of deli meat’ fashion

ART MEETS SCIENCE 5

could be a bit unsettling to people,” she said.

Viewers come in close, at first, she says. “They would see the

piece as an intriguing handmade object and put their noses up to

the glass and enjoy the subtle surprise that it is made of paper,”

she says, in the TEDMED lecture. Up close, a portion of the lacy,

intricate sculpture appears abstract. “Then, people would typically

back away, and they would be curious about what region of the

body they were looking at….They would usually start to identify

familiar anatomical landmarks.” The heart, perhaps, or the

ribcage.

When making a paper sculpture, Nilsson starts with medical

images, often culled from the Visible Human Project, a National

Library of Medicine initiative that collected anatomical images

from one male and one female cadaver. She usually consults

illustrations of specific parts of the body in medical textbooks as

well, to better understand what it is she is seeing in the Visible

Human cross sections. “My background is in illustration”—she has

a degree from the Rhode Island School of Design—”so I am used

to combining sources and just being resourceful in getting all of

the visual information I need to say what I want to say,” she says.

Nilsson creates a composite image from these sources and adheres

it to a base of styrofoam insulation. The two-dimensional image

serves as a guide for her three-dimensional paper sculpture; she

quills in between the lines, much like one colors in a coloring

book.

“I often start in the center and work out,” says Nilsson. She builds

a small quilling unit, pins it to the styrofoam base and then glues

it to its neighbor. “It is almost like putting a puzzle together,

where each new piece is connected to its predecessor,” she

adds. Working in this “tweezery” technique, as the artist calls it,

requires some serious patience. A sculpture can take anywhere

from two weeks to two months to complete. But, Nilsson says, “It

is so addictive. It is really neat to see it grow and fill in.”

There is a basic vocabulary of shapes in quilling. “I have really

tried to push that,” says Nilsson. “One of the things I don’t

like about a lot of quilling that I see is that the mark is too

repetitious. It is curlicue, curlicue, curlicue. I really try to mix

that up.” Follow the individual strands of paper in one of her

sculptures and you will see tubes, spirals, crinkled fans and

teardrops.

When the sculpture is finished, and all the pins have migrated to

the periphery, Nilsson paints the back with a bookbinder’s glue

to reinforce it. She displays her cross sections in velvet-lined

shadow boxes. “I really like them to read as objects rather than

images. I like the trompe-l’oeil effect, that you think you might

be actually looking at a 1/4-inch slice of a body,” says Nilsson.

“The box, to me, suggests object and frame would suggest an

image. The decorative boxes also say that this is a precious

object.”

Many medical professionals have taken an interest in Nilsson’s

work. “It feels like an homage, I think, to them, rather than that

I am trivializing something that they do that is so much more

important,” she says, with a humble laugh. Doctors have sent

her images, and anatomists have invited her to their labs. She

even has a new pen pal—a dissector for Gunther von Hagens’

Body Worlds, a touring (and somewhat startling!) exhibition of

preserved human bodies.

The connections Nilsson has made in the medical community

have proven to be quite helpful. “Where does this particular

anatomical structure end and where does the next one begin?

Sometimes it is not all that clear-cut,” says the artist. As she

works, questions inevitably arise, and she seeks out anatomists

for answers. “Sometimes I want to know what is a general

anatomical structure and what is an idiosyncrasy of the

particular individual I am looking at. Rib cages. How much

variance in shape is there? Am I overemphasizing this ? I am

always wondering, am I seeing this accurately? Am I reading this

right?”

Ultimately, Nilsson hopes that her works familiarize people with

the internal landscape of the human body—the “basic lay of the

land,” she says. “Everything is tidily squished in there in this

package that is graphically beautiful and also highly functional,”

she adds. “To me, the shapes are endlessly interesting. There is

just the right amount of symmetry and asymmetry.”

The Unsettling Beauty of Lethal Pathogens

Few non-scientists would be able

to distinguish the E. coli bacteria

from HIV under a microscope.

Artist Luke Jerram, however, can describe

in intricate detail the shapes of a slew

of deadly pathogens. He is intrigued by

them, as a subject matter, because of

their inherent irony. That is, something

as virulent as SARS can actually, in its

physical form, be quite delicate.

Clearly adept at scientific work—as an

undergraduate, the Brit was offered

a spot on a university engineering

program—Jerram chose to pursue art

instead. “Scientists and artists start by

asking similar questions about the natural

world,” he told SEED magazine in a

2009 interview. “They just end up with

completely different answers.”

To create a body of work he calls “Glass

Microbiology,” Jerram has enlisted the

help of virologist Andrew Davidson from

the University of Bristol and the expertise

of professional glassblowers Kim George,

Brian George and Norman Veitch.

Together, the cross-disciplinary team

brings hazardous pathogens, such as the

H1N1 virus or HIV, to light in translucent

glass forms.

The artist insists that his sculptures

be colorless, in contrast to the images

scientists sometimes disseminate that

are enhanced with bright hues. “Viruses

have no color as they are smaller than

the wavelength of light,” says Jerram, in

an email. “So the artworks are created as

alternative representations of viruses to

the artificially colored imagery we receive

through the media.” Jerram and Davidson

create sketches, which they then take to the

glassblowers, to see whether the intricate

structures of the diseases can be replicated

in glass, at approximately one million

times their original size.

These glass sculptures

require extreme

attention to detail. “I

consult virologists at

the University of Bristol

about the details of

each artwork,” says

Jerram. “Often I’m

asking a question about

how a particular part

of the virion looks,

and they don’t know

6 ART MEETS SCIENCE

British artist Luke Jerram’s handblown glass sculptures show the visual complexity and delicacy of E. coli, swine flu, malaria and other killing agents

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the answer. We have to piece together

our understanding by comparing grainy

electron microscope images with abstract

chemical models and existing diagrams.”

Yet, to physically create these structures in

glass, the design may have to be tweaked.

Some viruses, in their true form, would

simply be too delicate and wouldn’t hold

up. Jerram’s representation of the H1N1

(or Swine Flu) virus, for instance, looks far

spikier than it might in reality. This was

done, not to add to the ferocity of the virus’

image, but to prevent the artwork from

crumbling or breaking.

Jerram has to decide what to do when

new research suggests different forms

for the structures of viruses. “Over time,

scientific understanding of the virus

improves and so I have to amend my

models accordingly,” explains the artist.

For example, “I’m currently in dialogue

with a scientist at the University of Florida

ART MEETS SCIENCE 7

about the structure of the smallpox virus.

He has published papers that show a very

different understanding of the internal

structure. I now need to consider whether

to create a new model or wait until his

model has become more widely accepted

by the scientific community.”

Jerram’s art is often used in scientific

journals as an alternative to colorful

simulations, so being as up-to-date as

possible is definitely in his best interest.

Jerram’s marvelous glass sculptures bring

awareness to some of the worst killers of

our age. “The pieces are made for people

to contemplate the global impact of each

disease,” he says. “I’m interested in sharing

the tension that has arisen between the

artworks’ beauty and what they represent.”

8 ART MEETS SCIENCE

Oftentimes, when parents first see Jason Freeny’s

sculptures that reveal the inner anatomy of cherished

childhood toys, they get a little worried that their

children will be disturbed. Most kids, though, have a rather

different reaction.

“Kids aren’t scared by them. They’re fascinated,” says Freeny, the

New York-based artist who’s hand-sculpted hundreds of these

inner anatomies, built into commercially-available toys, over the

last seven years. “I believe that being frightened by inner anatomy

is a learned thing. It’s something that’s taught to kids by society,

rather than something that’s innate.”

Freeny himself responds to supposedly morbid anatomical

features—like, say, a Lego’s intestines, or Mario’s lungs—the same

way kids generally do. “I love anatomy,” he says. “As an artist, I’ve

always been a big fan of drawing organic shapes, because of their

complex detail.”

Freeny, who now creates the sculptures and other art full-time,

documenting their creation on his Facebook page, began working

on the project in 2007 on the side, while he still worked his day

job as a designer at a tech startup. It began when, while digitally

illustrating a balloon animal, he decided to try his hand at drawing

its inner anatomy. “I started by drawing its skeleton system, and

I was just fascinated by the completely grotesque skeletal system

that its shape was dictating to me,” he says.

After illustrating the innards of several other characters (including

a gummy bear), his startup closed, and he was laid off. Eventually,

he moved from his 600-square-foot Manhattan apartment to

Long Island—where he had enough space in the garage to do

some sculpting—and embarked on his first 3D anatomy project. “I

started cutting into a little Dunny toy, and decided to give it a clay

skeleton anatomy,” Freeny says. “That’s when it all really took off.”

In the years since, Freeny has anatomically-supplemented dozens

of different characters from video games, movies and even brand

See the Inner Anatomy of Barbie, Mario and Mickey Mouse—Bones, Guts and AllArtist Jason Freeny transforms familiar childhood characters into realistic anatomical models

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ART MEETS SCIENCE 9

advertisements. For each sculpture, he begins by buying a high-

quality toy (“If it’s a crappy toy to begin with, the sculpture is

going to end up looking crappy too,” he says), then cuts away a

portion of it. Using clay, he sculpts the character’s bones and a few

internal organs, then paints them what he imagines to be realistic

colors. Working on several pieces at a time, he completes about

four or five per month, and sells the hand-built sculptures on his

website along with his other artworks.

Hypothesizing the proportion of each character’s innards is the

trickiest part. “It’s like a reverse forensics project,” Freeny says.

“The exterior shape dictates what the skeleton looks like.”

He generally uses scientific illustrations to make the sculptures as

accurate as possible. However, because the characters themselves

are fictional, that’s sometimes impossible. “Mickey Mouse, for

example, is a mouse, but he walks upright, like a person,” he

says. “So his body, like many characters, ends up being more of a

version of a human skeleton, distorted to fit inside the character.

It’s a balancing act.”

One of Freeny’s current projects—Sid, the sloth from Ice Age—has

proven to be particularly difficult. “His body’s just very extreme,

and cartoony,” he says. “At first, I was approaching him as a

human, and it just wasn’t working, so I used some sloth anatomy

proportions. Almost the entire length of their bodies are ribcage,

which solved a lot of anatomical problems for me.”

Initially, Freeny was unsure what reactions his unconventional

work would garner, but they’ve been overwhelmingly positive.

In some cases, he’s even gotten praise from the creators and

manufacturers of the characters (although he’s also had a couple

of corporate legal teams tell him to stop making the sculptures,

alleging intellectual property infringement).

Although he recognizes the value of his sculptures as tools for

scientific education—and has seen his own kids learn from the

dozens of pieces lying around his workshop—his original intention

was never to teach anyone anatomy. “I just love exploring these

characters, and seeing what they look like inside,” Freeny says.

“I want to see the grotesque, weird anatomies that these toys

dictate.”

10 ART MEETS SCIENCE

In his book, Serpentine, Mark Laita captures the colors, textures and sinuous forms of a variety of snake species


Mark Laita captured plenty of photographs of snakes striking, their mouths agape, in the making of his book, Serpentine. But,

it wasn’t these aggressive, fear-inducing—and in his words, “sensational”—images that he was interested in. Instead, the Los

Angeles-based photographer focused on the graceful contortions of the reptiles.

“It is not a snake book,” says Laita. As he explained to me in a phone interview, he had no scientific criteria for selecting the species he

did, though herpetologists and snake enthusiasts will surely perk up when they see the photographs. “Really, it is more about color,

Snakes in a FrameMark Laita’s Stunning Photographs of Slithering Beasts

ART MEETS SCIENCE 11

form and texture,” he says. “For me, a

snake does that beautifully.”

Over the course of the project, Laita

visited zoos, breeders, private collections

and antivenom labs in the United States

and Central America to stage shoots of

specimens he found visually compelling. “I

would go to a place looking for this species

and that species,” he says. “And, once I got

there, they had 15 or 20 others that were

great too.” If a particular snake’s colors

were muted, Laita would ask the owner

to call him as soon as the animal shed its

skin. “Right after they shed they would be

really beautiful. The colors would be more

intense,” he says.

At each site, Laita laid a black velvet

backdrop on the floor. Handlers would

then guide each snake, mostly as a

protective measure, and keep it on the

velvet, while the photographer snapped

away with an 8 by 10 view camera and

a Hasselblad. “By putting it on a black

background, it removes all of the variables.

It makes it just about the snake,” says

Laita. “If it is a red snake in the shape of a

figure eight, all you have is this red swipe

of color.”

Without much coaxing, the snakes curved

and coiled into question marks, cursive

letters and gorgeous knots. ”It is as if these

creatures are—to their core—so inherently

beautiful that there is nothing they can do,

no position they can take, that fails to be

anything but mesmerizing,” writes Laita in

the book’s prologue.

For Serpentine, the photographer hand-

selected nearly 100 of his images of

vipers, pythons, rattlesnakes, cobras

and kingsnakes—some harmless, some

venomous, but all completely captivating.

He describes the collection as the “ultimate

‘look, but don’t touch’ scenario.”

In his career, marked with the success of

having his work exhibited in the United

States and Europe, Laita has photographed

flowers, sea creatures and Mexican

wrestlers. “They’re all interesting, whether

it’s in a beautiful, outrageous or unusual

way,” he says, of his diverse subjects.

So, why snakes then? ”Attraction and

repulsion. Passivity and aggression. Allure

and danger. These extreme dichotomies,

along with the age-old symbolism

connected with snakes, are what first

inspired me to produce this series,” writes

Laita in the prologue. “Their beauty

heightens the danger. The danger amplifies

their beauty.”

Laita embarked on the project without

any real phobia of snakes. “I used to catch

them as a kid all of the time. I grew up

in the Midwest where it is pretty hard to

find a snake that is going to do too much

damage to you,” he says. If he comes across

a rattlesnake while hiking in his now

home state of California, his first impulse

is still to try to grab it, though he knows

better. Many of the exotic snakes Laita

photographed for Serpentine are easily

capable of killing a human. “I probably

have a little more fear of snakes now after

dealing with some of the species I dealt

with,” he says.

He had a brush with this fear when

photographing a king cobra, the longest

venomous snake in the world, which

measures up to 18 feet. “It is kind of like

having a lion in the room, or a gorilla,”

says Laita. “It could tear apart the room

in second flats if it wanted to.” Although

Laita photographed the cobra while it

was enclosed in a plexiglass box, during

the shoot it “got away from us,” he says.

It escaped behind some cabinets at the

Florida facility, “and we couldn’t find it for

awhile.”

He’s also had a close encounter with a

deadly black mamba while photographing

one at a facility in Central America. “It

was a very docile snake,” he recalls. “It

just happened to move close to my feet

at some point. The handler brought

his hook in to move the snake, and he

inadvertently snagged the cord from

my camera. That scared the snake, and

then it struck where it was warm. That

happened to be the artery in my calf.”

Smithsonian contributing writer Richard

Conniff shares more gory details on his

blog, Strange Behaviors. Apparently, blood

was just gushing from the bite (“His sock

was soaked and his sneaker was filled

with blood,” writes Conniff), and the

photographer said the swollen fang marks

“hurt like hell that night.”

Obviously, Laita lived to tell the tale. “It

was either a ‘dry bite,’ which is rare, or I

bled so heavily that the blood pushed the

venom out,” he explained in a publicity

interview. “All I know is I was unlucky

to be bitten, lucky to have survived, and

lucky again to have unknowingly snapped a

photo of the actual bite!”


Artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg reconstructs the faces of strangers from genetic evidence she scavenges from the streets


Creepy or Cool? Portraits Derived From the DNA in Hair and Gum Found in Public Places

It started with hair. Donning a pair of rubber gloves, Heather

Dewey-Hagborg collected hairs from a public bathroom at

Penn Station and placed them in plastic baggies for safe

keeping. Then, her search expanded to include other types of

forensic evidence. As the artist traverses her usual routes through

New York City from her home in Brooklyn, down sidewalks

onto city buses and subway cars—even into art museums—she

gathers fingernails, cigarette butts and wads of

discarded chewing gum.

Do you get strange looks? I ask, in a

phone conversation. “Sometimes,” says

Dewey-Hagborg. “But New Yorkers are

pretty used to people doing weird stuff.”

Dewey-Hagborg’s odd habit has a larger

purpose. The 30-year-old PhD student,

studying electronic arts at Rensselaer

Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New

York, extracts DNA from each piece

of evidence she collects, focusing

on specific genomic regions from her

samples. She then sequences these

regions and enters this data into a computer

program, which churns out a model of the

face of the person who left the hair, fingernail,

cigarette or gum behind.

It gets creepier.

From those facial models, she then produces actual sculptures

using a 3D printer. When she shows the series, called “Stranger

Visions,” she hangs the life-sized portraits, like life masks, on

gallery walls. Oftentimes, beside a portrait, is a Victorian-style

wooden box with various compartments holding the original

sample, data about it and a photograph of where it was found.

Rest assured, the artist has some limits when it comes to what she

will pick up from the streets. Though they could be helpful to her

process, Dewey-Hagborg refuses to swipe saliva samples and used

condoms. She tells me she has had the most success with cigarette

butts. “They really get their gels into that filter of the cigarette

butt,” she says. “There just tends to be more

stuff there to actually pull the DNA from.”

Dewey-Hagborg takes me step-by-step

through her creative process. Once

she collects a sample, she brings it to

one of two labs—Genspace, a do-it-

yourself biology lab in Brooklyn, or one

on campus at Rensselaer Polytechnic

Institute. (She splits her time between

Brooklyn and upstate New York.) Early

on in the project, the artist took a crash

course in molecular biology at Genspace,

a do-it-yourself biology lab in Brooklyn,

where she learned about DNA extraction

and a technique called polymerase chain

reaction (PCR). She uses standard DNA

extraction kits that she orders online to

analyze the DNA in her samples.

If the sample is a wad of chewing gum, for example, she cuts a

little piece off of it, then cuts that little piece into even smaller

pieces. She puts the tiny pieces into a tube with chemicals,

incubates it, puts it in a centrifuge and repeats, multiple times,

until the chemicals successfully extract purified DNA. After that,

Dewey-Hagborg runs a polymerase chain reaction on the DNA,

amplifying specific regions of the genome that she’s targeted. She

sends the amplified DNA (from both mitochondria and the cells’

Photo by Dan Phiffer


nuclei) to a lab to get sequenced, and the

lab returns about 400 base pair sequences

of guanine, adenine, thymine and cytosine

(G, A, T and C).

Dewey-Hagborg then compares the

sequences returned with those found in

human genome databases. Based on this

comparison, she gathers information about

the person’s ancestry, gender, eye color,

propensity to be overweight and other

traits related to facial morphology, such

as the space between one’s eyes. “I have a

list of about 40 or 50 different traits that I

have either successfully analyzed or I am in

the process of working on right now,” she

says.

Dewey-Hagborg then enters these

parameters into a computer program to

create a 3D model of the person’s face.”

Ancestry gives you most of the generic

picture of what someone is going to tend

to look like. Then, the other traits point

towards modifications on that kind of

generic portrait,” she explains. The artist

ultimately sends a file of the 3D model to

a 3D printer on the campus of her alma

mater, New York University, so that it can

be transformed into sculpture.

There is, of course, no way of knowing how

accurate Dewey-Hagborg’s sculptures are—

since the samples are from anonymous

individuals, a direct comparison cannot

be made. Certainly, there are limitations

to what is known about how genes are

linked to specific facial features. “We are

really just starting to learn about that

information,” says Dewey-Hagborg. The

artist has no way, for instance, to tell the

age of a person based on their DNA. “For

right now, the process creates basically

a 25-year-old version of the person,” she

says.

That said, the “Stranger Visions” project

is a startling reminder of advances in

both technology and genetics. “It came

from this place of noticing that we are

leaving genetic material everywhere,” says

Dewey-Hagborg. “That, combined with

the increasing accessibility to molecular

biology and these techniques means

that this kind of science fiction future is

here now. It is available to us today. The

question really is what are we going to do

with that?”

Hal Brown, of Delaware’s medical

examiner’s office, contacted the artist

recently about a cold case. For the past

20 years, he has had the remains of an

unidentified woman, and he wondered

if the artist might be able to make a

portrait of her—another clue that could

lead investigators to an answer. Dewey-

Hagborg has worked on a sculpture from a

DNA sample Brown provided.

“I have always had a love for detective

stories, but never was part of one before.

It has been an interesting turn for the art

to take,” she says. “It is hard to say just yet

where else it will take me.”


A biologist and a poet team up for a new exhibition at the Seattle Aquarium that features images of bleached and stained fish skeletons

B y H e l e n T h o m p s o n

The skills that make a good biologist are not unlike those

that make a good artist. “A desire to understand detail,

you focus on how things work. These things are qualities

that good poets and good biologists share,” says Adam Summers,

a biologist at the University of Washington’s Friday Harbor Labs

and consultant on Finding Nemo.

Summers draws on his talents as a biologist and a

photographer for “Cleared: the Art of Science,”

an exhibition recently at the Seattle

Aquarium. The show depicts fish

specimens, bleached and stained

to reveal the complex skeletal

structures beneath their

scales.

Fish fascinated

Summers, even as

a graduate student.

“Always what interested

me was the interplay of

physics and engineering with

structure and evolution. So, when I saw in

museum collections, these cleared and stained animals. I was

immediately taken with them,” he says.

“Cleared” fish are fish rendered translucent by a combination

treatment: hydrogen peroxide to dissolve dark pigments, a

digestive enzyme called trypsin to dissolve the flesh apart from

collagen in the fish’s skin and skeleton and glycerin to make

skin and connective issue appear invisible. The technique

Summers uses to clear and stain fish has been common practice

of reasearchers for decades and relies on two dies: Alcian blue,

which gives cartilage a blue hue, and Alizarin Red S, a red dye that

acts on bone. Summers made a habit of including an image in the

scientific papers he would submit to different journals; the image,

directly related to the research at hand, was often selected as the

publication’s cover art.

Some of the specimens featured in the exhibition came from

bycatch and others were part of a study examining how fish

skeletons develop. Once a fish specimen enters Summers’ lab,

it might end up in several different studies on fish skeletal

structures, how they work and why they’re important.

Photographs of the wings of a butterfly ray and skate species, for

instance, provided insight into how a wing fin propels the fish

forward, a finding with applications in robotics. More recently,

the lab used a cleared and stained image of a northern clingfish

to figure out how the fish’s belly sucker, which can adhere to any

surface, works.

Summers’ first images were more scientifically oriented than

artistic, so when the opportunity arose to put together an

exhibition for the aquarium, he took new shots of many of the fish,

trying to achieve a more aesthetic affect. “I now sort of understand

that in order to make the animal relate to you, you need to

have some action and motion, some asymmetry, and a sense of

movement is really helpful,” he says.

The idea of standard captions for the images also seemed

underwhelming to Summers. So, he asked Sierra Nelson, a poet

The True Inner Beauty of Fishes


based in Seattle, if she would be interested in writing a poem to go with each fish. Nelson and Summers had worked together on another

art-meets-science endeavor: teaching companion courses on poetry and marine biology in a special program at Friday Harbor Labs. For

the cleared and stained specimens, having a caption as a poem “actually tells a lot about the actual biology of the fish,” he says. “That’s

the way Sierra works in her poetry.”

The experience has been enriching for Summers, who says that he’s learned more about art and how to communicate with the general

public. Because the lab’s research is largely funded by the National Science Foundation, he feels it’s important for taxpayers to see what

they’re paying for. “I hope that people looking at it get some appreciation for the internal beauty of fishes. That there’s more to them

than swimming around in an aquarium,” he says. “There really is this other dimension of their biology that’s worth appreciating.”


Photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher captures tears of grief, joy, laughter and irritation in extreme detail


The Microscopic Structures of Dried Human Tears

In 2010, photographer Rose-Lynn

Fisher published a book of remarkable

images that captured the honeybee in

an entirely new light. By using powerful

scanning electron microscopes, she

magnified a bee’s microscopic structures

by hundreds or even thousands of times in

size, revealing startling, abstract forms that

are far too small to see with the naked eye.

Now, as part of a new project called

“Topography of Tears,” she’s using

microscopes to give us an unexpected view

of another familiar subject: dried human

tears.

“I started the project about five years

ago, during a period of copious tears,

amid lots of change and loss—so I had a

surplus of raw material,” Fisher says. After

the bee project and one in which she’d

looked at a fragment of her own hip bone

removed during surgery, she’d come to the

realization that “everything we see in our

lives is just the tip of the iceberg, visually,”

she explains. “So I had this moment where

I suddenly thought, ‘I wonder what a tear

looks like up close?’”

When she caught one of her own tears

on a slide, dried it, and then peered at it

through a standard light microscope, “It

was really interesting. It looked like an

aerial view, almost as if I was looking down

at a landscape from a plane,” she says.

“Eventually, I started wondering—would a

tear of grief look any different than a tear

of joy? And how would they compare to,

say, an onion tear?”

This idle musing ended up launching

a multi-year photography project in

which Fisher collected, examined and

photographed more than 100 tears

from both herself an a handful of other

volunteers, including a newborn baby.

Scientifically, tears are divided into three

different types, based on their origin. Both

tears of grief and joy are psychic tears,


triggered by extreme emotions, whether

positive or negative. Basal tears are

released continuously in tiny quantities (on

average, 0.75 to 1.1 grams over a 24-hour

period) to keep the cornea lubricated.

Reflex tears are secreted in response to an

irritant, like dust, onion vapors or tear gas.

All tears contain a variety of biological

substances (including oils, antibodies and

enzymes) suspended in salt water, but as

Fisher saw, tears from each of the different

categories include distinct molecules as

well. Emotional tears, for instance, have

been found to contain protein-based

hormones including the neurotransmitter

leucine enkephalin, a natural painkiller

that is released when the body is under

stress.

Additionally, because the structures

seen under the microscope are largely

crystallized salt, the circumstances under

which the tear dries can lead to radically

dissimilar shapes and formations, so two

psychic tears with the exact same chemical

makeup can look very different up close.

“There are so many variables—there’s the

chemistry, the viscosity, the setting, the

evaporation rate and the settings of the

microscope,” Fisher says.

As Fisher pored over the hundreds of

dried tears, she began to see even more

ways in which they resembled large-scale

landscapes, or as she calls them, “aerial

views of emotion terrain.”

“It’s amazing to me how the patterns

of nature seem so similar, regardless of

scale,” she says. “You can look at patterns

of erosion that are etched into earth over

thousands of years, and somehow they look

very similar to the branched crystalline

patterns of a dried tear that took less than

a moment to form.”

Closely studying tears for so long has made

Fisher think of them as far more than a

salty liquid we discharge during difficult

moments. “Tears are the medium of our

most primal language in moments as

unrelenting as death, as basic as hunger

and as complex as a rite of passage,” she

says. “It’s as though each one of our tears

carries a microcosm of the collective

human experience, like one drop of an

ocean.”


Beachgoers despise the stinging animals, but photographer Aaron Ansarov finds surreal beauty in them


The Vibrant Patterns of Portuguese Men-of-War

Aaron Ansarov experienced some

depression after retiring from his

post as a military photographer in

2007. But, one of the things that made him

happy was walking in his backyard with

his son, pointing out beetles, salamanders,

praying mantis and other creepy crawlies.

“One day, he just said, ‘Daddy, let’s take

pictures of them,’” says Ansarov. “That

just never occurred to me. That’s when

everything changed.”

Ansarov, who lives in Delray Beach,

Florida, has three children: a 12-year-

old, a 3-year-old and a 2-year-old. He

transitioned from photojournalism to

commercial photography and fine art, and

in the process, he says, he has followed one

simple rule—to look at things through the

eyes of a child.

“It is very tough

as adults, because

we get bored. We

see things over

and over and they

are no longer as

fascinating to us as

they were when we

were a child,” says

the photographer.

“All I try to do is to

force myself to see

things freshly.”

After exploring his backyard (National

Geographic is featuring his “My Backyard”

series in a four-page spread in its June

2013 issue), Ansarov turned to the beach,

about a mile from his home. There, he

became captivated with Portuguese men-

of-war.

A man-of-war, if you’ve never encountered

one, is a bit like a jellyfish. It is a

transparent, gelatinous marine creature

with stinging tentacles, except unlike a

jellyfish, a man-of-war is a colonial animal

made up of individual organisms called

zooids. The zooids—the dactylozooid (that

brings in the food), the gastrozooid (that

eats and digests the food), the gonozooid

(that reproduces) and the pneumatophore

(an air sac that keeps the animal afloat)—

are so integrated that they form one being

with one shared stomach. Without their

own means of locomotion, the little-

studied men-of-war are at the whim of

tides and currents. Scientists do not know

how men-of-war breed or where their

migrations take them because they cannot

attach tracking devices to them, but, the

animals wash up on shore in Florida from

November to February. They turn from

purple to deep reds the longer they are

beached.

For the most part, Floridians and tourists

find men-of-war to be a nuisance. To some,

they are disgusting and dangerous even. As

a kid, I stepped on one at a Florida beach,

and I can attest that the sting is painful.

But, Ansarov approaches them with a

child-like curiosity. From December 2012

to February 2013, he made special trips

to his local beach to collect men-of-war.

He finds the creatures, with their vibrant

colors, textures and shapes, to be beautiful

and has made them the subject of his latest

photographic series, called “Zooids.”

To give credit where credit is due,

Ansarov’s wife, Anna, is the collector. She


wears industrial-grade rubber gloves and

walks the surf with a small cooler. When

she spots a blob in the sand, she grabs it

by its non-poisonous air sac and stows it

in her cooler with some sea water. Ansarov

then takes the men-of-war back to his

studio, where he washes the sand from

them and lays them one-by-one onto a

light table.

“I’m spreading them out and I’m using

tweezers to somewhat separate their

tentacles and untangle them and then from

there just move them around and see what

shapes develop,” says the photographer.

“I’ll shoot one for five or ten minutes and

then put it back and do the same process

with the others.”

After the shoot, Ansarov returns the living

men-of-war to the beach where he found

them and let’s nature take its course.

“Either they get swept back out to sea or

they die with the others on the beach,”

he says.

Ansarov often sees air bubbles that

resemble eyeballs and tentacles that frame

alien-like faces in his photographs. To

accentuate this, he “mirrors” each image

by opening it in Photoshop, expanding

the canvas and flipping it once. In nature,

he points out, we respond more to

symmetrical things. “If we see two eyes or

two arms or two legs, we recognize it a lot

more,” he says.

In Ansarov’s Zooids, the anatomical parts

of the men-of-war quickly become any

number of things: moustaches, antennae,

beaks and flared nostrils. The colorful

patterns are “nature’s Rorschach test,”

the photographer has said. Everyone sees

something different.

“One person told me they saw a raccoon

playing on drums,” says Ansarov. I see a

startled toucan in one—and aliens, lots and

lots of aliens.

Photo by Scott Schmidt


Photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher uses a powerful microscope to capture all of a bee’s microscopic structures and textures in stunning detail


What Does A Bee Look Like When It’s Magnified 3000 Times?

You’ve probably seen a bee fly by

hundreds of times in your life, if

not thousands. When it arrived,

maybe attracted by something you were

eating or drinking, you likely shooed it

away, or perhaps remained entirely still to

avoid provoking a sting.

One thing you probably didn’t do was

consider how the bee would look under

intense magnification, blown up to 30,

300 or even 3,000 times its original size.

But—as photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher

has discovered over the past two decades

working with powerful scanning electron

microscopes (SEMs) to capture images of

the insects in remarkable detail—everyday

bees feature incredible microscopic

structures.

“Once you scratch the surface, you see

there’s a whole world down there,” says

Fisher, who published her photos in the

2010 book Bee and had them featured

in an exhibition Beyond Earth Art at

Cornell University in January 2013.

“Once I started, it became a geographical

expedition into the little body of the bee,

with higher and higher magnifications that

took me deeper and deeper.”

Fisher began creating the images back in

1992. “I was curious to see what something

looked like under a scanning electron

microscope, and a good friend of mine

was a microscopist, and he invited me to

bring something to look at,” she says. “I’ve

always loved bees, and I had one that I

found, so I brought it in to his lab.”

When Fisher first looked at the creature

through the device, she was awestruck

by the structures that comprised its body


at scales naked to the human eye. One of

the first that captured her attention was

the bee’s multi-lensed compound eye. “In

that first moment, when I saw its eye, I

realized that the bees’ eyes are composed

of hexagons, which echo the structure of

the honeycomb,” she says. “I stood there,

just thinking about that, and how there are

these geometrical patterns in nature that

just keep on repeating themselves.”

Fisher was inspired to continue exploring

the body of that bee, and others,

continually looking at their microscopic

structures and organs in greater and

greater detail.

Her creative process started with the

obvious: collecting a specimen to examine.

“First, I’d find a bee, and look at it

through my own regular light microscope

to confirm its parts were intact,” she

says. “The freshest ones were the best,

so sometimes I’d find one walking on

the ground that looked like it wouldn’t

be around much longer, and I’d bring it

home and feed it some honey, to give it

something nice for its last meal.” Some

of these were rejuvenated by her care,

but those that weren’t, and perished,

became the subjects of her microscopic

exploration.

At her friend’s lab, in off hours, Fisher used

a model of scanning electron microscope

called a JEOL 6100, which can detect

objects as small as 40 angstroms (for

comparison, a thin human hair is roughly

500,000 angstroms in diameter). Before

scanning, she’d carefully coat the bee in an

ultra-thin layer of gold sputter coating.

This coating, she explains, enhanced the

electrical conductivity of the bee’s surfaces,

which allow the microscope to detect

them in finer resolution. “The SEM uses

a very finely focused electron beam that

scans across the surface of the prepared

sample,” she says. ‘It’s akin to shining a

flashlight across the surface of an object

in a dark room, which articulates the form

with light. With an SEM, it’s electrons, not

light—as it moves across the bee’s surface,

it’s converting electrical signals into a

viewable image.”

Once the bee specimen was prepared

and mounted inside the SEM’s vacuum

chamber, Fisher could use the machine

to view the insect at different angles, and

manipulated the magnification to look for

interesting images. At times, zooming in

on the structures abstracted them beyond

recognition, or yielded surprising views

she’d never thought she’d see looking at a

bee.

“For instance, when I looked at the

attachment between the wing and the

forewing, I saw these hooks,” she says.

“When I magnified them 700 times, their

structure was amazing. They just looked so

industrial.”

Zoom in close enough, she found, and a

bee stops looking anything like a bee—its

exoskeleton resembles a desert landscape,

and its proboscis looks like some piece of

futuristic machinery from a sci-fi movie. At

times, Fisher says, “you can go in deeper

and deeper, and at at a certain level, your

whole sense of scale gets confounded.

It becomes hard to tell whether you’re

observing something from very close up, or

from very far away.”


Inspired by Japanese fish rubbings, two University of Texas biologists make spectacular prints of a variety of species at different stages of decay


Animal Specimens, From Fish to Birds to Mammals, Get Inked

Adam Cohen and Ben Labay are

surrounded by thousands of

fish specimens, all preserved in

jars of alcohol and formalin. At the Texas

Natural Science Center at the University

of Texas in Austin, the two fish biologists

are charged with documenting

the occurrences of different

freshwater fish species

in their home

state and those

neighboring

it.

That is

their day

job, at least.

Outside of

work, Cohen and

Labay have teamed up

on an artistic venture they call the Inked

Animal Project. Since 2008, the colleagues

have made surprisingly tasteful prints

of actual animal carcasses—scales, fur,

feathers and all.

Both scientists have dabbled in art—

drawing, painting and sculpting—for

as long as they can remember. As a kid,

Cohen even used an octopus and flying fish

that he bought at an Asian market as huge

stamps to make ink patterns on paper.

Fish, of course, were a natural subject for

two ichthyologists, but Cohen and Labay

were also familiar with a Japanese art form

called Gyotaku (meaning “fish rubbing”),

where artists slather ink on fresh fish

and press them onto paper as a means of

recording the size and other details of the

catch.

Their first collaboration was a poster with

prints of all ten sunfish species that live

in Texas, and the Inked Animal Project

was born. They inked trout, bass and

catfish. But why stop with fish?

The duo quickly expanded

its repertoire, applying

the same printmaking

technique to mice,

squirrels, rabbits,

geese, gulls,

hummingbirds

and a smattering

of deer, pig and cow

skulls. No specimen

seems to fluster the artists.

I interviewed Inked Animal’s creators

by email to learn more about where they

obtain their portrait subjects, how they

produce the prints and what exactly

possesses them to do this.

As you know, Gyotaku is both an

art form and a method of

scientific documentation.

Are there certain

anatomical traits you try

to accentuate in your Inked

Animal prints for scientific

purposes?

Ben: I don’t think we print for any

tangible scientific goal, though we do print

in a spirit of documentation, similar to

goals of the original Gyotaku printings I

guess. As we’ve expanded our medium

beyond fish, we’ve been interested in

trying to document life processes through

the animals, such as internal or unique

anatomy and “road-kill” or animated

postures.

Adam: Not long ago I ran across some

field notes belonging to a fish collector

from the late 1800s, Edgar Mearns, who,

rather than preserving a particularly large

fish, decided to trace the animal on paper

and insert it in his fieldbook. We were well

into the Inked Animal Project at that point

and that‘s when I realized what we were

really doing was a form of documentation

as well as art. But, in reality, these days

with cameras so ubiquitous, there is little

need to print or trace the animal on paper

for documentation purposes. I think our

prints have relatively little scientific value,

but substantial artistic value. I often

think about the physical characteristics

that someone who knows the

species well would

need to see

to verify the

identity of the

specimen, but I

try not to let that

get in the way of

creating interesting

art. I’d much rather

have interesting art of an unknown and

unverifiable species.


How do you collect the animals you

print?

Adam and Ben: We get the animals in all

sorts of ways. In the beginning

we went fishing in

our spare time.

Recently, as word of

our project got out, we’ve

had people donate specimens. A

lot of our friends are biologists,

hunters, exterminators and people

who work in animal rehabilitation; they

have access to animals and are excited to

donate to the cause. Additionally, there are

a lot of great animals to print that can be

purchased through exotic Asian grocery

stores. We’re getting serious about printing

larger animals, like farm livestock. We

would love to get an ostrich or emu too.

On your website, you say, “Our

tolerance for gross is very high.” Can

you give an example of a specimen

that pushed this tolerance to its

limits?

Ben: My personal worst was the armadillo.

We’ve had worse-smelling animals like a

gray fox that was sitting in a bucket for a

full day before we printed. But something

about working with the armadillo really

grossed me out, almost to the point of

vomiting. Most mammals are squishy with

decay, but the armadillo was a stiff football

of dense rotten meat. It’s also a bizarre

animal that we don’t ever expect to get so

intimate with. This is just a crazy theory,

but animals like the Eastern cottontail

or gray fox are more familiar, and maybe

more approachable or acceptable when

rotten. When it comes to larger, strictly

wild animals, things get more interesting

and intense.

Adam: Ben mentioned a gray fox that we

printed in the early days of Inked Animal. I

remember picking it up and the juices ran

down my arm. But I was so excited by the

print we were getting, which I think was

the first time we realized that we were on

to something really unique, that I hardly

even thought about it. We recently printed

a very rotten deer whose skin peeled away

as we lifted the cloth to

reveal a writhing mass

of maggots—that was

pretty gross too.

You are almost

more interested

in prints of

dismembered, rotting

or partially dissected specimens,

right? Why is this?

Ben: When we started to expand from fish

to other types of animals, Adam and I felt

excited about not just doing something

unique, but doing art that was deeper

than just a pretty picture. I think we both

feel that there is something indescribable

about the animal prints, which allows

people to view them from different vantage

points. You see it as an animal print,

and also as a process. I like the idea of

documenting rotting or dissected animals

because it emphasizes the process part

of the experience. People see it and can

immediately imagine what must have

happened to produce the image. Most

people love what they see even though it’s

something, which if seen in real life, would

disgust and repulse them.

Adam: At first I think most people think

working with animal innards to be a

little gross, but really there’s lots to offer

aesthetically in the inside. Ribs, lungs and

guts provide very interesting patterns and

textures. Blood stains and feces add color.

These are the parts of the animal that are

not usually seen so they catch the viewer’s

attention and cause reason for pause.

If, for example, the animal is a road kill

specimen, whose guts are spilling out—well

that’s an interesting story that we can

capture on paper.

Do you try to position the specimens

in a certain way on the paper?

Adam and Ben: Absolutely. We think

about position quite a bit. Mainly we want

to capture natural poses, either making

the animal seem alive or dead. Often if the

animal has rigor mortis or could fall apart,

due to rot, we are limited to how we can

pose them. Sometimes animals come to us

very disfigured, depending on the cause

of death, and we’ve been surprised by the

beautiful prints that can be obtained from

them.

Can you take me through the process

of making a print? What materials

do you use, and what is your

method?

Adam and Ben: We are always

experimenting with different papers,

fabric, inks, clays and paints as well as

different application methods, but it really

all boils down to applying a wet media to

the animal and then applying it to paper

or fabric. The trick is finding the right

kinds of materials and transfer technique

for each kind of specimen. The process for

bones is very different than fleshed out

animals; and birds are different than fish.

Having two of us is often essential for large

floppy animals where we want to apply

the animal to the table-bound paper. Fish

can be the most difficult; their outer skin

is essentially slime, which repels some

inks and creates smudgy prints on paper.

You have to remove this outer slime layer


before you print a fish. Salt seems to work

well for this. We often do varying degrees

of post-processing of the raw print with

paint or pencils.

What do you add by hand

to the actual print?

Ben: For each animal we’ll

likely do half a dozen to a

couple dozen prints searching

for the perfect one. With

all these replicates, we’ll

play around with different

techniques of post processing.

The traditional Gyotaku

method restricts touch-ups to

accenting the eye of the fish. I

think we’ve at minimum done

this. But we’ve employed a lot

of post-processing techniques,

including pencil, watercolor,

acrylic, clay, enamel and even

extensive digital touch ups.

Adam: There is a balance that we are

trying to achieve regarding preserving

the rawness of the print and creating a

highly refined piece. We like both and find

ourselves wavering. Recently, we’ve started

to assemble prints together digitally and

sometimes alter colors and contrast for

interesting effects.

What are the most challenging

specimens to print?

Adam: I think small arthropods

(animals with exoskeletons)

are particularly difficult and

time consuming. We’ve come

up with the best method, to

completely disassemble the animal

and print it in pieces. The other trick with

them is to apply the ink very thinly and

evenly. Anything with depth is also difficult

and sometime impossible since the way

paper and fabric drapes across the animal

can result in very distorted looking prints.

Ben: Small fish or insects. Fish because

they are just so small, and the details

like scales and fin rays don’t come out

well. And, insects because they can be so

inflexible, and their exoskeletons are, for

the most part, pretty darn water repellent,

restricting what kinds of paints we can use.

What animal would you like to print

that you haven’t yet?

Ben: Generally, I’d love to print any

animal that we haven’t already printed.

That said, I have a gopher in my freezer

that I’m not too excited about because it

will likely turn out as a

hairy

blob. And once you’ve

done one snake, another the same size is

hard to distinguish. Large animals are, of

course, charismatic and impressive, but I

also really enjoy the challenge of trying to

capture details on smaller animals. There

are some animals that do, in theory, lend

themselves to printing. For example, we

have a porcupine in our freezer that I’m

really excited about.

Adam: I get excited about anything new

really. To date, we’ve been primarily

interested in working with Texas fauna,

but we are excited about other possibilities

as well. I especially like animals with

interesting textures juxtaposed. For

example, I think the more-or-less naked

head and legs of an ostrich with the

feathery body would be interesting and

very challenging. But, beyond specific

animal species, we’re now experimenting

with the process of rot, a commonality

of all dead animals. One project involves

placing a fresh animal on paper and

spray painting it at various intervals with

different colors as it rots and expands.

The result is an image of the animal

surrounded by concentric rings that

document the extent of rot through time.

What do you hope viewers take away

from seeing the prints?

Ben and Adam: We like to think there

is something in the animal prints that

captures both the spirit and the raw

corporeal feel of the animal. It’s amazing

to us that the art was created by using an

animal as a brush so-to-speak, and that

there’s even DNA left on the art itself.

We hope people have a similar thought

process and feeling

about the work.

We also hope that

the project and print

collection as a whole

serves as a way people

can better approach and appreciate the

biodiversity around us.


Most of us are content to

hear music. But, German

photographer Martin Klimas

decided he wanted to see it.

“I was listening to lots of minimalist

music—contemporary classical and free

jazz—and I started looking for imagery

that could express it best,” he says. “Then,

soon afterward, I came across the research

of Hans Jenny and his Study of Wave

Phenomena.”

In the sixties, Jenny, a German physician

and scientist, began experimenting with

and photographing the effects of sound

vibrations on a variety of materials—fluids,

powders and liquid paste. By setting these

substances on a rubber drum head and

making it vibrate, he found that different

tones produced different spatial patterns

in the materials: Low tones led powders

to gather in simple, straight lines, while

deeper tones produced more complex

patterns.

“It gave me an idea,” Klimas says. “I

wanted to take these two things—the

effects of vibrations, and music—and bring

them together.”

Over the next year, he spent countless

hours capturing what he calls “sonic

sculptures” of a variety of musicians—

everyone from Jimi Hendrix and Pink

Floyd to Philip Glass and Johann Sebastian

Bach. “I use an ordinary speaker with a

funnel-shaped protective membrane on top

of it,” he says. “I pour paint colors onto the

rubber membrane, and then I withdraw

from the setup.”

After cranking the speaker to max volume,

“I leave the creation of the picture to the

sound itself,” Klimas says. At the precise

moment when the paint starts flying, a

soundtrigger—a device that detects spikes

in noise—automatically snaps photos with

his Hasselblad camera.

Klimas used songs from a variety of styles

and periods to make the photos. “I mostly

selected works that were particularly

dynamic, and percussive,” he says. Many of

the songs he chose were by musicians with

some relationship to visual art—like The

Velvet Underground—or had influenced

artists, like Ornette Coleman’s “Free Jazz,

A Collective Improvisation.”

In total, the series took months to produce,

and required hundreds of attempts. “The

most annoying thing,” Klimas says, “was

cleaning up the set thoroughly after every

single shot.”

See more of Martin Klimas’ work on his

website.

Photographer Martin Klimas sets paint atop a speaker and cranks the volume, snapping shots as the boom of music pulses paint into the air


The Sounds of Pink Floyd, Daft Punk and James Brown, As Expressed by Flying Paint


With the help of a little liquid nitrogen, German photographer Martin Klimas captures the fragile chaos of flowers as they explode


What Happens When You Freeze Flowers and Shoot Them With a Gun?

German photographer Martin Klimas has a thing for

explosions. Previously, he’s made art by photographing

shattered fragile ceramic figures as they hit the ground

and firing projectiles at onions, pumpkins and ears of corn.

Now, he’s brought this explosive approach to a new medium:

flower blossoms in full bloom, frozen by liquid nitrogen.

“I was inspired by the blossoms themselves,” he says of his new

project, “Exploding Flowers,” which he worked on for nearly a

year and publicly debuted in the summer of 2013. “There are so

many different forms and species on the planet. I was interested

in the blossom’s architecture, and I tried to make that visible by

breaking the blossom into as many pieces as possible.”

To achieve this, he sought out flowers with particularly complex

internal structures and froze them to -200° Celsius in liquid

nitrogen. Once they were frozen, he had to be careful. “They’re as

fragile as raw eggs,” he says. “You can destroy them by sneezing.”

After the flowers were frozen, he brought them to his set and

placed the stem in a vice to hold the blossom in front of a white

background. He used a normal air gun rigged with a device that


let him remotely pull the trigger, and took a series of shots right at

the moment of impact.

“I often use science often to create new photographs,” he says. “I

look to the scientific techniques that have evolved over the past

100 years, and I try to extract the poetic side of science to generate

powerful images.”

Like many of Klimas’ previous projects, “Exploding Flowers”

brings disorder to objects and images we usually think of as

stable. “Many of the images I produce, you normally can’t see that

moment with the naked eye,” he says. “My images make these

moments of chaos visible. To me, that’s the fascinating part.”

Of course, when you break flowers into thousands of tiny pieces

to create this chaos, someone has to clean it all up. Between each

session, Klimas had to sweep up piles of fragmented flower petals.

“It’s a bit annoying,” he says, “but there are other projects—like

when I worked with paint—that are much more intensive to

clean up.”


Houston photographer Deborah Bay captures the violent power of projectiles lodged in bulletproof plexiglass


The Big BangEnthrall ing Photos of Exploding Bullets

Deborah Bay was in a store that

sells building materials in her

hometown of Houston, Texas,

when she saw a display of bulletproof

plexiglass. A few different types of

ammunition were lodged in the hard

plastic to demonstrate the strength of the

product.

“I thought it was intriguing,” says the

photographer. “You could see all the

fragments of metal. You could see the

spray of the shattered plastic and then you

could see the trajectory lines that were

running through the panel of plexiglass.”

Bay did some research, talking with people

and poking around online, to try to find

some law enforcement officers who would

create some similar plexiglass panels for

her. She was about to give up when she

found a willing group of professionals

at the Public Safety Institute at Houston

Community College. The officers shot

several different weapons with a variety

of bullets at panels of bulletproof

plexiglass. The result was an array of

beautiful explosions in the plastic—a static

testament to an energy that was once

violently kinetic.

From there, Bay photographed the

plexiglass panels against a black backdrop,


different colored lights cast on them, using a medium format

camera with a macro lens. She calls her series of about 20 images

“The Big Bang.”

“When I go in and start working with the camera,” says Bay, “it

really does take me to another world.”

The patterns that the projectiles leave on the plexiglass on impact

look like galaxies, stars and meteors flying through space. The

more the photographer combs collections of images taken by the

Hubble Space Telescope, the more she sees the resemblance. It’s

this intuitive leap from the macro to the cosmic that inspired the

series’ clever name.

Of course, once viewers are brought back down to Earth with the

knowledge of the actual subject, they can sometimes experience

what Bay calls a “psychological tension”—that is, the unsettling

contrast between the beauty of the images and the destruction

that comes with a gunshot.

“As arguments about the right to bear arms fill the media, guns

continue to fascinate and to repel—sometimes simultaneously,”

says Bay, in a statement on her website. The issue hits home for

her as a resident of Texas, a state with about 51 million firearms

or, as she notes, “two guns for every man, woman and child.”

“Only a small amount of imagination is needed to realize the

impact any of these bullets would have on muscle and bone,” she

says. “I just want people to think about what these bullets

can do.”


With a surprisingly light touch, the New York City-based photographer instills feelings of solitude in his images of massive glaciers


Caleb Cain Marcus’ Photos of Glaciers on a Disappearing Horizon

What happens when you lose

your grip on the horizon?

How much does it warp your

sense of scale? One trek on the 97-square-

mile Perito Moreno glacier in Patagonia

and Caleb Cain Marcus was hooked by

these questions of perspective. With that

experience, in January 2010, the New

York City-based photographer launched a

two-year odyssey, documenting, in his own

minimalist style, glaciers all around the

world—in Iceland, Alaska, New Zealand

and Norway.

Marcus shares 3o photographs taken in

his travels in his latest book, A Portrait

of Ice. The images—three of which were

acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of

Art—are “eerily gorgeous and unusual,”

writes Marvin Heiferman, a known critic

and curator, in an essay featured in the

book. “Instead of picturing monumental

walls of ice that advance over and disrupt

what lies beneath, or icebergs that break

away from glaciers to float majestically, if

threateningly, at sea, these photographs

suggest that glaciers cover the earth’s

surface lightly, like a sheet, rather than

bearing down upon it,” he adds. The

comparison that Heiferman makes later

in the essay is compelling: “The jagged

rocks, ridges and pinnacles that poke

through the frigid surfaces don’t register

as being particularly dangerous, but more

like the eccentrically rendered landforms

you might soar over in a dream or in the


elegant flight-simulation of a video game.”

Intrigued, I recently had the opportunity to

interview Marcus by phone. We discussed

some of the thoughts driving the project

and his process:

When you exhibit the series, you

like the photographs to measure 43

inches by 54 inches. Why do you like

to work in this large-scale format?

Obviously, the glaciers themselves are

quite large. I think it is easier to get

immersed in something when it is large. I

think small makes things potentially more

intimate. If it is small, you are required to

go up close to it and inspect it. If it is large,

you can sort of be overwhelmed by it.

What inspired your initial trip to

Perito Moreno glacier in Patagonia?

I was visiting someone in Buenos Aires,

and then we took a side trip and flew

outside of El Calafate, which is a small

town in Patagonia. Near El Calafate was

Perito Moreno. It seemed like a good

opportunity to go and visit a glacier. I grew

up in Colorado, and I have a love for the

mountains and open space, which I don’t

get much of in New York.

How did you explore the glacier?

What did you get to do?

I just hiked around on it. Many glaciers are

covered with snow, so you don’t really see

them as glaciers as much, at least I don’t,

because you are not seeing the ice. You are

seeing the snow, which is layering on top of

the ice. This was probably the first hard-ice

glacier I was on.

What was it about the experience

and the photographs that you shot

that really inspired you to spend

the next two years photographing

glaciers around the world?

The ice landscape was certainly one that

I hadn’t visited before. I think that many

people never really get a chance to visit it

or never choose to visit it. Most of us have

seen some form of a desert and a forest

and an ocean, but we haven’t really just

seen ice. It is quite a different ecosystem,

and one that fascinates me quite a bit.

Everything is so open and so expansive.

I think it was that feeling of expanse and

emptiness and solitude, on a personal

level, that made me want to be there.

When I took the pictures, I had this idea to

try to see what would happen if the horizon

disappeared. Living in New York City,

unless you live very high up, you never see

the horizon, which is really kind of odd

and something that took me a few years to

realize. You are missing that. It is such a

grounding presence for people to be able to

see the horizon. I’m not sure we are really

aware of the effects of not being able to see

it. I thought, okay, if I get rid of the horizon

or I try to, how is that going to affect the

feeling of the picture? You lose a sense of

scale.

Many of the images are vertical, with

mostly sky and then the surface of

the glacier occupying just a small

portion at the bottom. Why did you

choose to compose them this way?

I think there are three general options. One

would be that you would have about half

glacier and half sky. I think that would be

too balanced. Then, you could have much

more glacier than sky, which would work,

but it would produce something that is

much denser. I didn’t really feel like the

glaciers were so dense or so heavy, even

though they are so massive. I wanted to

create a feeling of more openness; I think if

you have more sky than glacier that helps

to do it. It helps to make it float a little

more. Having just this small amount of

density of color at the bottom, contrasted

by that wide open space, also creates a

balance in a way. Because the sky is more

empty, they still sort of take up equal

weight on the image.

Do you want the viewer to lose

perspective?

I would say probably most people looking

at it wouldn’t realize that there is no

horizon—at least, not consciously. But

I think that one of the things it does

is it makes it feel less familiar. When

something is less familiar, then we look

at it more closely, instead of just glancing

at it and saying, “Oh, I know what that is.

It is a glacier, or that’s a tree or a person

or an apartment building.” If it has a little


bit of a twist, then I think people spend

a little more time or there is a little more

examining. Maybe there is more potential

that there is some effect on them, which

would be ideal.

How did you think about color?

In terms of the colors of the glaciers,

whether they are blue or gray or more

cyan, I didn’t have too much choice. I was

looking for the glaciers with more color.

There are a few that are almost black and

white, which are in Iceland. That was after

the volcano erupted a couple of years ago,

so those have the mist and the ash from the

volcano. It doesn’t give it an intense color,

it is giving it a very subtle color.

Did you have certain criteria for

the glaciers and locations that you

picked?

That was one of the challenging aspects.

You never really knew what you would

get. I would look at topographic images

and satellite images. I would talk to other

climbers and get a general sense of what a

glacier I was going to might look like. But

whenever I got there, it was all a surprise.

I was looking for texture and color, so

that they had some kind of resonance,

some personality. In the book, there are

nine different glaciers. I probably went

to more than 20 glaciers, so only a small

number of them are represented. The other

ones, either I wasn’t on the ball or else the

glacier wasn’t on the ball. Somehow the communication between

the two of us didn’t work out.

I imagine there were a bunch of logistics that went into

these trips.

In terms of getting to the glaciers, pretty much all of them

required a hike. I kayaked into some of them and took a helicopter

once or twice. Most of the time I had a guide. Of course, the

guides are there to find access to the glacier and then also as a

safety measure or policy. In that regard, they want to make sure

that you come back in one piece, which is a good thing, but it also

means that they always try to keep reins on you. I don’t like having

someone holding me back. I am always running around, and they

are always yelling at me. It would usually take a few days for our

relationship to sort of coalesce into something smoother. There

would be some friction in the beginning. Then, after a few days,

we would have a better understanding of each other.

The guides were quite resourceful in terms of their information. I

actually met with a few scientists on various glaciers. In Norway, I

met with a couple of them measuring the speed of the flow of the

glacier. So, I would always take the opportunity to talk to them.

In your own essay in A Portrait of Ice, you write, “The

Inuit elders say the melting of the ice is the land crying

out in pain. Now we must listen.” The statement implies

an activism on your part. Is that one of your intentions?


Do you want viewers to care more about the environment and about the melting of glaciers?

I think photographing glaciers I was pretty aware that even if there wasn’t too much of that sentiment that it would be there in the

background. I feel very close to the earth or however one wants to term it. I think that we have more than half of the people living in

cities now in the U.S. With that, we are losing an awareness for the natural environment. Whether these bring people closer to the

environment or not, I don’t really know. I certainly think that if people were more connected to it, that they would act differently in their

lives. A lot of the people who make decisions on a high level are, I think, even more detached because they are so immersed in running

corporations or in making more money. I think that the planet suffers because of that, and so do we.

These images are excerpted from the book, A Portrait of Ice, published by Damiani.

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