Changes [Apr 01, 2008]
Ten Things 2007: Pe...I actually stumbled upon this competition while looking for pretty microscope photos to put on my main project page. Having some microscope shots myself, I started thinking about trying out. Then I saw the actual entries, picked my jaw up off the floor, and decided that there was no way I was good enough. Not yet, anyway. I didn't have the equipment, or the training, or...
...Well. What kind of people did enter this competition, then? What kind of image were they projecting? Unpacking it in that direction, my thought process went as follows:
First off, competition-quality photos cannot be taken off of just any old compound microscope. Therefore, they probably work in a nice lab, or know someone who does, because where else would they have access to such a nice microscope? (Or, they must have bought the microscope they used with your own money. And trained themselves. Which means they're rich.) Either way, they are probably highly educated. They are skilled, to be able to fine-tune such complex equipment, and artistic, to be able to come up with a creative presentation of whatever they're magnifying. Above all, they're intelligent -- because it's likely they're using that beautiful microscope photo in a research project of theirs as well.
Come to think of it, that projected image isn't so different than that of the folks who bought Microscopia ludicria, back in the 17th-18th centuries. Ironic.
In another sense, the competition also made me realize that the user is now the sole connoisseur of the microscope. It used to be that the makers of the microscope were the true connoisseurs, the true experts. Going farther back, the earliest pioneers -- Leeuwenhoek, Hooke, and their fellows -- were experts of both manufacture and usage. In the current age of mass production, the folks on the assembly line who make the microscopes don't use the microscopes. Heck, they don't even make the entire product. As we touched on in the Mini lecture, they are separated from the artifact, divorced emotionally from it. Partially, that is made up by the customization within the framework of mass production, which we touched on earlier. But distinctiveness and individuality also must come from the images themselves, from the user, now that the microscope body itself has lost its uniqueness.
| The fact that there is a competition like Nikon's Small World emphasizes the microscopic image as a form of art -- and at the same time, deemphasizes the microscope itself as art. The microscope is simply the instrument through which the image is created, like a paintbrush or a pencil. Microscope quality matters, but only as a means to an end, not the end itself. Still, that reflects our progression from a hand-crafted to a mass-produced society. In a complete turnaround from the microscope's earliest days, it takes a lot less skill to make a 'scope nowadays than to use one -- so we have moved from the microscope as art, to microscopy itself as art. |
Not that this is a bad thing. Microscopy images contain subtleties and dozens of hidden meanings that other media simply cannot reproduce. Take this entry from the Small World Competition in 1999:
I see a gold-edged forest at midnight. It looks like an etching, or a lithograph. What do you see?
If we were to get technical about it, it's actually Viagra at 250x, under polarized light. Definitely not your everyday painting.
Here's a dinosaur femur at 100x, revealing the composition of the bone structure, as well as being a little slice of abstract art:
These are pretty cool, but I've saved the best for the next page. Enjoy some fine art in the Microscope Gallery...
