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Interview: Dee Breger, electron microscopist
Apr 26, 2005
Speaking of authenticity, Dee Breger creates art from an electron microscope. Like Ron Pompei, she's a speaker at Gel 2005.
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Dee Breger
Director of Microscopy, Drexel University
Q - You send an electron beam onto a specimen below, then look for art.
Yes. I like to extract the most aesthetic, pleasing, raw images that I can from a sample that tells an exciting story. Any microscopist can do the mechanics; it's the human response to what I do with it that's unusual.
I want to excite people both visually - the images have to stand on their own as art - and by the fact that they are exotic. These are photographs of real things taken by an exotic scientific technology, which presents us with a view of an otherwise invisible world. I first want my images to be beautiful. Some people say they see a spirituality in my work.
Q - What about the authenticity of the images?
Electron microscope images are always created in black and white. I post-process each image to make it even more beautiful, for instance by adding color.
Of course, in some cases, people just don't know how to see the structure in black and white, so color helps people interpret the images. Even scientists need help sometimes. There's the famous story of the scientist who was caught as he was walking to the post office to mail in his manuscript to a scholarly journal. Turns out that what he had identified as the bacteria he was studying were the pores of the filter paper. It's the bane of a lab manager's existence - you train someone on the technology, how to use the microscope on their samples, and they don't necessarily know how to interpret the resulting imagery.
Images are never colorized for scientific publication, unless they're being displayed on the cover of a journal or at a conference. Not all scientists are attuned to the artistic potential, or even agree with it. There are some purists who think that images from electron microscopes must not be manipulated in any form. So I used color not for hard-core science, but for translation.
Q - What is the artistic potential of these images?
Enormous. They are inherently aesthetic, if you can find them. It's just like the macro world we live in. Anyone who photographs or paints a scene is recording what's presented to us by nature. Nature has provided the same imagery on an invisible scale - that includes the galactic and the microscopic.
