Felice Frankel Interview. February 10, 2004.
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Mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, the father of fractal geometry, has called your book Envisioning Science “priceless.” That’s high praise.
I am so grateful for his support. Benoit has spoken to me often about how the mathematics of his fractals came after he first saw their images. This is one of my soapboxes: seeing a thing first often leads to an expansion of ideas after.
We are visual creatures after all, are we not?
Absolutely. We have to be very careful because there’s so much visual noise out there. Digital manipulation can change the information in images, so we need to become intelligent about how images are made. Envisioning Science is an attempt to encourage future scientists, and also non-scientists, to look at science through a camera’s lens - to go deeply into the ideas that one can capture in a photograph, or any sort of illustration. It’s about visually communicating ideas in science. That’s what I’m totally committed to.
You did a wonderful job with the yeast colony, for example.
Thank you. Yes, the hardcover version of Envisioning Science has a detail of what some people see as a stunning picture of a yeast colony, which looks just like a flower. The patterns within this flower are even more exciting. I took this photograph in [yeast genetics pioneer] Gerald Fink’s lab at MIT for a science journal. I made the picture with the Petri dish and later digitally removed it because I thought it would bring more attention to what was going on in the most important part of the image - these wonderful patterns. We did, by the way, get the cover of Science, which I was delighted about, but the researchers were concerned that by digitally altering the image, I was also deleting information about scale. It’s those conversations that are so important to have in the science community.
In the seventeenth century, natural philosopher Robert Hooke said, “A sincere hand and a faithful eye to examine and to record the things themselves as they appear.” Where do you draw the line with the aesthetics of the scientific image? The problem is, that line keeps moving around! It really depends upon the purpose of the image. If I make the picture for a submission to a science journal, obviously we want to be as straightforward as possible. I don’t think I’m bringing in an aesthetic. I believe I’m revealing an aesthetic that makes the image more accessible. (more…)
