Museum Former landscape photographer Felice Frankel is still focused on visual aesthetics, but these days her camera is capturing the dazzling blues and umbers of nanosensors, the luminous fuchsia planes of microrotors and the delicate translucent contours of bacterial colonies. An artist in residence at MIT and a visiting lecturer in electrical engineering and computer science, Ms. Frankel illustrates cutting-edge research in biology, chemistry, physics and other disciplines using microscopic photography and digital imaging. While much of her work has been produced at MIT, she has also created images in research labs at Harvard, Brandeis, Lehigh, the University of Chicago and the University of California at Davis. Ms. Frankel's emphasis on the beauty inherent in science is calculated. She believes that bringing an aesthetic component to scientific documentation is an essential and underutilized method of making science more accessible to the masses.
Every image is a scientific question, a wonderment, a poem.
In collaboration with research scientists, Ms. Frankel also creates images for publications including Science, Nature, Cellular Biology, Langmuir and Discover. A book of her images, also titled On the Surface of Things, with text by noted Harvard chemist George M. Whitesides, will be published by Chronicle Books in the fall. In addition to a Guggenheim fellowship, Ms. Frankel has received grants from the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. She studied at Harvard as a Loeb Fellow from 1991-92. After a five-month run at the Compton Gallery, On the Surface of Things will be at the Museum's main exhibition center from July 15 through November 2.