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Envisioning Science: The Design and Craft of the Science Image

by Felice Frankel
MIT Press, Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 2002. 328 pp.,
illus. Cloth, $55.00. ISBN 0-262-06225-9.

Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens
2022 X Avenue, Dysart, Iowa
USA.
ballast@netins.net

In the introduction to this book, two statements are purposely made to stand out: One advises you to "read the images as if you were reading text"; while the other boldly states that "this book is intended to teach you to see." The book's title was almost certainly derived from Edward Tufte's Envisioning Information (1980), which advocates similar attitudes toward the communication of statistical data. That book is recommended in the bibliography of this one, as are a number of memorable works such as Charles and Ray Eames' Powers of Ten, the stroboscopic photographs of Harold Edgerton, Peter Stevens' Patterns in Nature, and Cyril Stanley Smith's From Art to Science. Books of that genre (which began to appear in the 1950s) were less technical than inspirational, and encouraged an almost poetic regard for the startling resemblance between Modern-era scientific and abstract artistic images, a view that Gyorgy Kepes called The New Landscape in Art and Science (1956). This book differs from those in the sense that it can also can serve as a technical handbook for scientific photographers, a manual that the cover states "should become a standard tool in all research laboratories." Written by an MIT Research Scientist, it is primarily addressed to other scientists, with the purpose of showing them how to produce (for illustration and presentation) documentary images that are both accurate and effective. It includes specific sections about the basics of photography (point of view, composition, lighting, etc.); on photographing minute phenomena through stereo microscopes, compound microscopes, and scanning electron microscopes; and on presenting or printing the final results. There is also a visual chronology of the history of scientific images, compiled and annotated by Scientific American columnist Phylis Morrison, who with her husband, MIT physicist Philip Morrison, was an early important contributor to science education. This is an exceptionally beautiful book. Artists, particularly graphic designers, will be delighted by its typography and page layout, designed by Stuart McKee, and the rich, expressive impact of its wealth of images.

(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review, Vol. 18, No. 1,
Autumn 2002.)


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