See more: An illustrated version of this article will be published within the next two weeks on our CultureLab books and arts blog
Berenice Abbott Photography and Science: An Essential Unity at the MIT Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts, until 31 December
I AM mesmerised by Berenice Abbott’s wave and interference images. Not only are they visually stunning and scientifically informative, they also hide a secret. These, like many of the black-and-white prints on display at the MIT Museum , and in the accompanying book,, were taken using innovative photography techniques and apparatus devised by Abbott with researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Abbott was first known for Changing New York, a collection of photographs published in 1939 that documented the Works Progress Administration relief effort during the Great Depression. Science imaging came later when, in her sixties, she began work at MIT.
Seeing the potential in capturing physical science on film, Abbott turned her ingenuity to concepts such as magnetism, energy transformation and motion. She captured ripples in surfaces, like those seen on the right, by tailoring the wave frequency and light source to achieve clear images on the photographic film that lay under the shallow water tank in which they were created. It is the brilliant composition and deceptive simplicity of these photographs that makes them so effective.
The exhibit makes me smile as I am reminded of the little secret we science photographers hold dear: making images of science teaches us the science. You can hear it in the recordings of Abbott’s science explanations, exhibited alongside the prints. For me, the key to Abbott’s work is its elegance. She knew what to leave out – something researchers should pay attention to. The methods she used to capture the images meant that they were always black and white, which adds to their artistic quality and increases the abstraction. Even in her more “how-to” images in the book, which hint at how they were taken, I am still stunned by their arresting beauty.
“Abbott knew what to leave out – something researchers should pay attention to”
Documenting Science
Steidl