Microscopic landscapes

Science can be as stimulating to the eye as it is to the mind, according to Felice Frankel, 'artist in residence' at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is working with researchers there to help them find better ways of communicating their work visually. Although she started out as a biologist, Frankel has also had a successful career as a landscape and architectural photographer. Now, she is using photomicrography and digital imaging to illustrate the beauty inherent in science — thereby, she hopes, bringing it to a wider audience. The delicate translucent contours of migrating bacteria (above left) were photographed in the laboratory of James Shapiro at the University of Chicago. The amber and purple swirls on the petri dishes on the right (photographed in the laboratory of Anatole Zhabotinsky at Brandeis University) are captured at a moment in time of the Belousav–Zhabotinsky reaction, which has been used to help understand the morphological patterning of tissues. An exhibition of Frankel's images, On the Surface of Things: Images in Science and Engineering, runs at the MIT Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts until November, and a book of her work will be published in October by Chronicle Books.