Photographer Felice Frankel of Harvard is showing scientists what they can gain from better pictures of their work.
Pat McCaffrey
Don’t call Felice Frankel an artist. True, she does create striking images of scientific subjects, from yeast blooms to microscopic machines. But the photographer, a senior research fellow at Harvard whose work has appeared on the covers of Nature, Science, and other journals, is adamant that her pictures are about depicting scientific concepts in an eye-catching way, not about making art.
Still, by bringing a photographer’s eye into the lab, Frankel has helped researchers make better images of their experimental results. Her images have been used in more than 300 peer-reviewed journal articles. She has published two books of her work, exhibited her photos in science museums across the United States, and mounted permanent installations at Harvard and MIT.
In the process, she has spurred researchers, once leery of working with “artists,” into thinking more about how best to visually present their results to other scientists and the public. “I think I have helped researchers to see that including a certain aesthetic and clarity in an image helps express the work they do,” she says.
Frankel, a self-taught photographer, got her start with the gift of a Nikon camera from her husband. That present revealed a hidden talent for documenting architecture. After publishing a well-received book on landscape architecture, Frankel came to Harvard in the fall of 1991 as a 47-year-old Loeb Fellow at the Graduate School of Design.
During that year on campus, while the other fellows were taking courses in design, she haunted the science center. She has a degree in biology and years ago worked in a lab at Columbia University. “Science was always a part of my life,” she says.
One day Frankel wandered into a class taught by the renowned Harvard chemist, George Whitesides. After the lecture, she approached him with an idea. She noted that chemists spent a lot of time drawing pictures badly and said that perhaps she could help. Whitesides agreed to a collaboration.
Her timing was good. Whitesides had just submitted a paper to Science. “It turned out to be a very important paper, and their pictures were lousy,” she says. “So I said, ‘Let me see what I can do.’”
She worked with a postdoc in the lab to add color and drama to images of water droplets contained within microscale water-repellent organic monolayers etched onto a tiny gold plate. Science accepted the paper and one of Frankel’s photos, showing the water droplets in a blue and green checkerboard pattern, ended up on the cover.
*This photo appeared on the cover of the September 4, 1992 issue of Science. * (Credit: F. Frankel)
That image marked the beginning of Frankel’s immersion in scientific photography. She began work as a research scientist at MIT, where she remained for 14 years until moving to Harvard earlier this year.
Frankel says it was hard in the beginning to convince some faculty of the benefits of working with a photographer. “I knocked on doors of scientists and they thought I was crazy, but little by little, they started trusting me. They could see that I’m not producing my art. I was producing an expression of their science.”
Indeed, when MIT chemist Moungi Bawendi began working with Frankel several years ago, he was impressed by how she came to the lab meetings, learned about the science behind the nanomaterials they were developing, and then worked with his students to produce insightful photos.
An image that Frankel made for Bawendi’s lab—a simple line of six vials containing different sized quantum dots, all chemically identical, but each glowing in its own distinctive color—became quite popular as a means of conveying the special properties of the tiny semiconductor crystals. The photo is 10 years old and Bawendi still gets requests for it. “Working with Felice, the things we wanted to say seemed to just pop out in the image,” he says.
Frankel’s photo of vials of quantum dots shows how this nanomaterial’s color can be tuned. (Credit: F. Frankel)
Frankel’s enthusiasm for visualizing science has led her to take on a broader mission of educating researchers on ways to better communicate their research. She’s organized a series of workshops called Image and Meaning, where she brings together scientists, graphic artists, and writers to explore how images can convey complicated concepts.
In 2004, she began Picturing to Learn, a National Science Foundation-funded project that incorporates drawing as a teaching tool in certain undergraduate science classes at MIT and Harvard. As it turns out, when students try to explain a scientific phenomenon by drawing it, the results give professors surprisingly clear insight into what the students understand—or don’t understand.
Frankel moved to Harvard in September to join the newly created Initiative in Innovative Computing (IIC). Part of its work is to find ways of visualizing large data sets. After hearing Frankel interviewed on public radio, IIC director and astrophysicist Alyssa Goodman signed up for one of the workshops and later asked Frankel to join her new venture.
At the IIC, Frankel will have room to grow her Image and Meaning workshops and bring the Picturing to Learn project to more Harvard undergraduate science classes. However, she may find herself using that Nikon less frequently, as she explores computer-aided image making as a new way to represent data and scientific ideas.
Click here for more of Frankel’s photos.