Scientific images, spawned by explorations into worlds we cannot see with the human eye—be they too small and intricate or too large and far away—have not only helped humans understand themselves and their surroundings, but have also documented the advances and challenges of our times. A new release from Aperture, Seeing Science: How Photography Reveals the Universe, provides a survey of such images, from a X-ray diffraction photograph of DNA to an image of the Event Horizon Telescope, which will attempt to produce the first image of a black hole.

Scientists first began using photography to document the world around them and share their findings. British botanist Anna Atkins, often regarded as the first female photographer, worked with cyanotypes—shadow images that are created by placing objects onto light-sensitive paper and then exposing the paper and object to the sun. She created numerous cyanotypes to illustrate and share the various plant specimens she collected in her field work.

Scientific images also have the power to show us the fragility of Earth. Earthrise, the famous photograph taken by astronaut William Anders during the Apollo 8 mission, shows Earth rising over the surface of the Moon. The image shows just how precious—and vulnerable—our planet is. A beacon of life with its clouds, water, and green landmasses surrounded by the darkness and emptiness of space. Similarly, photography has been used to create a visual record of the effects of climate change. James Balog’s time-lapse images of the Bridge Glacier in British Columbia show how the glacier has melted over time, providing powerful and undeniable evidence of a warming planet.

To the general public, the labs, spaceships, and distant landscapes where scientists do their work can seem far removed from everyday life, but photography not only propels scientific discoveries, but continues to give scientists the ability to share their findings with the world. And through these images, we learn not only about the importance of science, but also about our place in the universe.

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Matthew Porter’s photographs of airborne vintage muscle cars, collected and accompanied by an essay by Rachel Kushner in a recent release from Aperture titled, The Heights, are simultaneously playful, nostalgic, and ethereal. The dreamlike worlds in which these flying cars exist are distinctly American landscapes—rural and urban—and they offer viewers a sort of time portal, transporting them into a sun-soaked scene from a 1960s or ’70s American movie. The realm Porter’s cars and drivers inhabits are times when the world is either waking up for a new day or letting another slip away—those times of transition when the light shifts and the color of the sky evolves by the second.

It’s not only the cars that are suspended in Porter’s images, but the viewer must also suspend disbelief when the cars rise to heights that defy logic—and gravity. And this is precisely because the images are illogical and were created not on the streets of New York, Los Angeles, or the Blue Ridge Parkway, but in Porter’s Brooklyn studio. He photographs the miniature muscle cars and backdrops separately, later combining the images digitally.

The fantastical worlds Porter creates evoke feelings of liberation, release, and flight—feelings we might not experience during an ordinary day, when our feet are resigned to the ground. But that’s precisely the magic of these photographs—their ability to take our minds to a light-filled landscape where we can feel the wind in our hair, having escaped from the burden of gravity and everyday life on Earth.

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Enter Southern California, with its abundant sunshine, fresh air (at least, at the time), deserts, and mountains. Seen as “a natural sanatorium,” by 1911, there were around 23 long-term health clinics in Southern California. As the sanatoriums matured, so did their design. Renowned architects of the early 20th century became involved in the crusade, including Alvar Aalto, who designed Paimio Sanatorium, a tuberculosis clinic in Finland, and a special chair known as the “Paimio scroll chair,” which “allowed patients to recline while slim back-slats provided cooling and hand grips helped in getting up.” The chair was a hit not only in clinics, but soon found its way into many of the modernist homes that became popular in California in the mid-20th century.

One such home was the Health House, an iconic building designed by Richard Neutra for Dr. Philip Lovell, a New York transplant-turned-naturopath who advocated for natural cures and wrote about them in a Los Angeles Times column called “Care of the Body.” The house, with its outdoor sleeping porches, abundant vegetation, and expansive windows, embodied the values Lovell championed. Neutra described the home as a “machine in the garden,” and it would come to exemplify the architectural movement known as California Modernism.

Some California sun seekers immersed themselves in nature itself. William Pester, born in Germany in the late 19th century, ventured into the California desert, making a hut from palm fronds and wood. Kilston writes that he was long-haired, richly bearded, and “wore homemade sandals and often nothing else.” Pester believed that the troubles and sicknesses of mankind came from a departure from nature, and so, this “Hermit of Palm Canyon,” as he came to be known, sought refuge from the modern world in the desert around 1906. He foraged for food, lived simply, and was one of the first “back to nature” enthusiasts in California. When tourists caught wind of Pester, his first instinct was to retreat farther away, but he soon capitalized on their curiosity and sold postcards with his image on one side and his guidelines for healthy living on the reverse. Pester and his contemporaries—a group known as the Nature Boys—were prototypes of the hippies of the 1960s.

The profound influence of these sanatoriums, health-conscious design, and the lifestyle of the likes of William Pester continue to resonate in present-day Southern California. Sun Seekers highlights these lesser-known characters and stories and traces the evolution of Southern California’s health-focused culture, recycling trend after trend—from holistic celebrity doctors to restaurants promoting “living” foods. So while the mythos of Southern California shape-shifts, the belief that the land and climate is a cure-all continues nonetheless.

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When photographs are created by light falling on film, they show what was physically present at that particular moment in time, but some also reveal the emotional undercurrent of a moment as well: what’s not seen but felt, and what reverberates. “The raw materials of photography,” Carter once said in an interview, “are light and time and memory.”

Carter’s oeuvre is vast, but the enigmatic nature of his way of photographing people, the places they live and work, and the animals that populate their worlds can be seen in the hundreds of images included in Keith Carter: Fifty Years, a retrospective published by the University of Texas Press.

On the surface, the photos are snapshots of commonplace goings-on—an image of a five-year-old boy holding a large and weathered baritone in Mexico or two women at a church service in Newton, Texas. But Carter manipulates light and focus to evoke the moods and stories of his subjects. His particular technique of focus—sometimes sharp and bright, often intentionally blurred—and the shallow depth of field, a common practice of 19th century photographers, creates pictures where the story is not spelled out.

Animals have long been an interest of Carter’s, and he often features horses. Carter, quoting Leonardo da Vinci, describes them as “God’s most perfect design.” Many of his most haunting photos explore the invisible links between humans and beasts: A boy hugs his horse goodbye after it’s sold, a Mississippi man sees a litter of kittens as his family, and a distraught woman discovers that a fox found its way into her henhouse. Each portrait presents a puzzle to viewers, who must attempt to discover for themselves what it is about this certain image that makes it so poignant.

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For five years, from 2010-2015, British photographer Chloe Dewe Mathews traveled throughout this part of the world, chronicling its people, politics, and geography. Her photos detail not only the elements of its famous geology—which include oil and uranium—but also the practices that connect residents to a land they see as by turns mystical, practical, religious, and therapeutic. In her photos, Azeris seek healing by sitting in baths of crude oil in the town of Naftalan, Azerbaijan, while two Kazakh sisters walk through a field of rock towards an underground mosque.

Published by Aperture and Peabody Museum Press, and accompanied by exhibitions at Aperture Gallery in New York and the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, Mathews’ Caspian: The Elements offers a disquieting and kaleidoscopic look at human life in a region of the world most often seen through the lens of natural resources and geopolitics.

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This 40-year retrospective of the acclaimed photographer, Dawoud Bey: Seeing Deeply, published by the University of Texas Press, covers the full scope of Bey’s work chronicling American communities. The photos are accompanied by essays from leading curators, critics, and scholars. Over the course of his long and varied career, Bey has paired photographs of high school students next to brief biographies written by the subjects; created studio portraits of artists and colleagues; and shot unlikely pairs of people from the same communities who wouldn’t otherwise have met. Through Bey’s lens, his subjects receive a level of respect and a glimpse into their shared humanity that is nothing short of marvelous.

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Many of the maps are astoundingly intricate, yet leave room for the imagination. With vastly different styles, some maps are whimsical, others feature gorgeous calligraphy, and many are witty. (Case in point: the map titled “Voyage of the Goblin Showing How She Went Across and Came Back” notes that “Her Outward Track Is Marked Only Approximately Because They Did Not Know How to Allow for the Tides and Their Steering Was Rather Uncertain.”) A number of them also give a window into the process of writing, like the map Jack Kerouac sketched for On the Road long before he wrote the novel.

The essays reveal the intimacies hidden in the maps: Charlotte Brontë’s brother Branwell, a painter, drew a map based on a land she had imagined years earlier. Treasure Island was inspired by a map Robert Louis Stevenson created to entertain his stepson. William Faulkner, though, drew his own maps of his fictional Yoknapatawpha County.

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That’s the question I often get when I enter the office of a feed mill or grain elevator, asking permission to make photographs on the property or inside the buildings.

Showing other photos that I’ve taken usually satisfies the operator that I’m not working for the local tax assessor or real estate agent, and I receive permission to proceed.

But it’s a good question: Why do I keep up with this activity? What is the motivation? There is no coherent explanation except to say that it is something I feel must be done.

For more than 45 years, I’ve been taking pictures of feed mills and grain elevators in the towns of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. Here, the mills—plants that turn grain and other materials into food for farm animals—were once common enough to be taken for granted, even as they often provided a town landmark.

Now, changes in the scale and economics of the agricultural industry have made smaller mills and elevators redundant or inefficient. Some small town mills are still in operation—they might hang on by doing custom grinding (special mixes that depart from the standard recipe to treat particular conditions in animals), or selling lawn and garden products, or mixing for horses and other pets. One I visited even serves ostriches and llamas. But many smaller facilities have been replaced or engulfed by larger ones. Some have been torn down. Some have fallen into disrepair. A portion of history is slipping away.

My documentation of this history began as a passing interest. I worked—I’m now retired—as an industrial photographer, filmmaker, and later, video producer. I have no personal connections to farming or milling. But I like to get outside, and I take pictures of everything that catches my eye. One day in the late 1960s I photographed a beautiful porcelain door knob on a dilapidated building. Later, I saw a similar building while out riding my bike, and I asked someone if she knew what it was. “Oh, that’s the old feed mill,” she told me, and added that it had closed a couple of years before. It was scheduled for demolition. “They’re going to put some stores on the lot.” 

A few days later I drove back with camera gear.

I went to the library. I researched. I became a regular reader of Michigan Farmer magazine and the trade journals like the Milling Journal. I learned that 19th-century feed mills were almost always located alongside a railroad track, usually about seven or eight miles apart—about as far as a farmer would want to drive a team of horses on a hot summer day. My collection of pictures grew. I used photos on Google maps to follow train tracks to a likely mill. Often, I’d be directed to my next location by a conversation with a worker at the previous: “Have you photographed the mill in Jamestown? It’s back off the road on 180th Street … Better hurry though, they’re going to get rid of it pretty soon.”

I now have thousands of images of feed mills and grain elevators. I came to know the workers at various places. The owner-operator of a mill in Carson City still remembers when, just a boy, he left a tank of slow-moving molasses unattended, and it overflowed to coat everything—floors, machinery, stored feed. (He had to clean up the mess.) I’ve been told many tales, many as humorous as this one, but also some that bordered on the tragic. These include workers’ anxiety about a passing way of life, their resignation at changes, and their grief over accidents in mills and elevators—which are still more common than they should be.

My photographer’s eye remains fascinated by the variety of the structures. They’re true examples of vernacular architecture. As they age and undergo repairs, they often acquire a mix of building materials. One section might include wood shiplap siding, wood clapboard siding, metal siding and a metal roof, corrugated steel, brick, tar paper, and even a car license plate used to patch a hole.

What they don’t include is ornament or decoration. Except for the Christmas Stars. They are made on a framework of metal pipe with lightbulbs attached, mounted at the top of the tallest elevator. The lights are lit eight days before Christmas and are left on until New Year’s Eve. (I have asked a number of times about the reason for the eight days, and the only answer I’ve gotten is “custom.”) When I’m driving on an interstate in December, look out over the snow-covered farm fields, and see one of those stars glowing in the dark, I know that I am in the right place for me.

I’ve photographed mills in every season, even in the rain and snow. I focus most on light. At times, I prefer the low raking angle of a winter sun, which accentuates the deeply engraved textures of an old building. At times, I prefer to photograph when clouds veil the sun to produce a misty cloak over a sharply detailed structure. I capture the pattern of dappled sunlight coming through tree leaves, or I open a door to let bright outdoor light spill across the floor inside.

One of my influences is the French photographer Eugène Atget, who took pictures of Paris and its environs in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, concentrating on old and medieval parts of the city. He eked out a precarious living by selling prints to artist supply shops (who resold them to painters as references for quaint old scenes). Atget “viewed the whole world as a finished work of art,” said Berenice Abbott, the American artist who saved his negatives and helped his work achieve recognition, “and photography was just the act of pointing.”

So many old mills have been waiting a long time for me to appreciate them. For my part, I’m only pointing.

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Since the 1990s, especially after the fall of President Suharto in 1998, Yogyakarta has also become known as a center of Indonesian contemporary arts, along with Bandung. There are now more than 50 active art spaces and institutions, mostly privately owned and run by artists themselves. These spaces routinely organize exhibitions, performances, talks, residencies, and other events.

This makes living in Yogyakarta tough, because there are so many exhibits and events to go to. The period requiring the greatest endurance for art audiences is Jogja Art Weeks, in May through June, when there are more than 100 events around the city—there can be as many as 10 events in a day during the first week.

Yogyakarta’s art scene is inclusive in ways that elude other cities. Most creative events here are free of charge, but even the paid events are not as expensive as in the capital city Jakarta. Artists sell their work with price tags only rich collectors can afford, but they also make merchandise so common people can buy their art, too.

The scene itself values mixing, which has allowed creative sectors to bloom all around the city. Younger artists have open conversations with older artists. Artists of the so-called “southern art district” hang out with students and academics of the so-called “northern academic area.”

Jogja Art Weeks was initiated in 2015 by the contemporary art fair ARTJOG. Started in 2008, ARTJOG attracted artists and art practitioners from other cities and abroad, and that encouraged other groups to hold their own events during the month-long art fair, so ARTJOG’s guests would also visit their events. It did not go well at first, as each space was concerned only its own events. Jogja Art Weeks is a solution that encourages everyone to share guests via a joint publication.

The idea of embracing each other to strengthen the city’s branding as a creative hotspot is also evident in the recently formed Jogja Festivals consortium, which consists of 15 arts, cultural, and creative events, among hundreds of festivals held in Yogyakarta including fine art, performing arts, film, and music. Though the festivals work hand in hand with the municipal government, the consortium as well as the festivals involved are mostly initiated by artists or practitioners. The local government sometimes gives financial support to arts and creative events, but there is no real cooperation between the government and the arts community, because arts and culture in general are not yet seen as strategic for the growth and development of the city.

In Indonesia the government regards traditional arts and culture as national treasures. Contemporary arts and creative sectors, by contrast, are seen in an economic light—as a potential source of well-paying jobs without the environmental costs of industry. Under President Joko Widodo’s administration, there is now a ministerial level body dedicated to the creative economy, Badan Ekonomi Kreatif (BEKRAF). The government has recruited professional practitioners as its head and deputies, but because it was conceived by the Ministry of Tourism, BEKRAF still has a problematic position because it sees the arts and creative economy mainly as tangible products to promote tourism.

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The scariest place I have ever been—that was not intended to be scary—is this crypt beside the church of Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini in Rome. At the foot of Via Veneto, the church contains a Caravaggio, but you could be forgiven for overlooking it, in favor of the adjacent vaults. For there lie the bones of some 3,700 former Capuchin and Franciscan monks, a haul that began with 300 cartloads of deceased brethren who accompanied the friars that founded this church in 1631 and added to it until 1870. What to do with this avalanche of human remains? The dead would be buried in the earthen floor for around 30 years, without a coffin, and then exhumed and transformed into decoration, to make room for the freshly deceased. Friar Michael of Bergamo led the initial arrangement of the crypts and their occupants, “burying” their brethren in a way that at once suited the available space—the walls, ceiling and floor of six vacant crypts alongside their church—venerated the remains, and created what many retrospectively label as one of the most beautiful, moving, and haunting art installations ever made.

If the message of this reburial-as-artwork was not clear, it is written into the floor of the final crypt, beneath the child’s skeleton: “What You Are, We Once Were, What We Are You Will Be.” Memento mori. Remembrance of death. Be a good Christian, before it’s too late.

As horror-filmic as the Capuchin ossuary chapels in Rome may sound, the creepiness of moving through them is cut by a cocktail of beauty (in the careful, aesthetic arrangement of this walk-through sculpture, for which bones happen to be the medium instead of wood or marble), tenderness (the hands of the friars who placed and fastened each component), and the sublime (the sweeping knowledge that death conquers all). For those who can’t walk these bone-covered crypts, memento mori can be appreciated on a much smaller scale—a single skull in some of the West’s greatest artworks.

Of course, the skull is a universal symbol. They are warnings of the possibility of death, flapping white on black on the Skull and Crossbones pirate flag, decorating the lapels of the SS, and on labels of poisonous materials. Prehistoric cultures displayed severed heads, and then the remaining skulls, of their vanquished opponents. Some Vikings made goblets out of the skulls of their defeated, which is perhaps the ultimate symbol of having conquered the body—not only did you kill and dismember it, but you repurposed the seat of the mind, the most human part of its corpus, and made it into something as mundane as a beverage holder. But these are displays of skulls as symbols, warnings—not artworks in the traditional sense.

Then there are vanitas paintings, still-lives that usually include a skull, among other inanimate objects that symbolize passing time—an hourglass, a burning candle, ripening then rotting fruit—as well as objects that are associated with vain youth, which will wrinkle, rot, and crumble in time—makeup, mirrors, dice. Philippe de Champaigne’s Vanitas (1671) is as good an example as any. From the artist’s perspective, these are exercise pieces, paintings of still-lives that allow you to show off your abilities at naturalistic reproduction, but to charge it with more meaning than a basket of fruit or vase of flowers alone might carry.

When the skull is taken out of a still-life and added to a religious work, it shifts from vanitas to memento mori. It’s hard to find a depiction of Saint Jerome without a skull. Jerome is usually shown naked in the desert, knelt before a cross and repeatedly whacking himself in the head with a rock, penitent and chastising his body in prayer. In these scenes, the skull serves as a reminder of a) Christ’s sacrifice, crucified at a place called Golgotha, which is Aramaic for “place of the skull” and which is supposed to have been the site where Adam’s skull lay, and b) the need for Jerome to hurry and engage fully in his prayers, before he becomes a skeleton, himself. The other version of Saint Jerome shows him as a scholar, in his study as he writes the Vulgate, his famous translation of the New Testament from Greek into Latin. In these images, as in Marinus van Reymerswaele’s Saint Jerome (1541), a skull gazes up from his desk, a ticking clock reminding Jerome and the viewer to be a good person (in pre-modern Europe that meant a good Christian) and to live life to the fullest.

A more complex version of the same Christian message may be found in Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533), famous for a mathematical/artistic trick, anamorphosis. This is a mathematical formula by which an image can be contorted or stretched in such a way that, when viewed normally from the front of a painting, it appears blurry or unintelligible, but when viewed from an acute angle or specific viewpoint, it optically “fixes” itself and we can see the image for what it really is. In The Ambassadors, what is ostensibly a double-portrait of two friends, the French secular and ecclesiastical ambassadors to the English court of Henry VIII, hides much more meaning. On the two-tiered table laid out between the two fully-painted figures are instruments to read the skies and constellations (telescope, astrolabe, celestial globe) and instruments of, or to measure, the earth (a ruler, books, a lute, a terrestrial globe).

But if we look closely enough, all is not well. On the celestial plane, the upper register of the table, it is as we would expect; but on the earthly level, the lower register, something is amiss, a-harmonic: a single string on the lute is broken, a reference to Henry VIII’s breaking with the Catholic Church and causing terrestrial disharmony. This message is further strengthened by the crucifix that peaks out from behind the green curtain at the back of the painting. This detail was only recently revealed after a restoration—it had been painted out at some earlier point, likely because it made too clear the underlying political message of this double portrait. But what people remember about the painting (my students, certainly) is the muddy shiver of white and black paint that appears to perhaps be a rug or tiles on the floor before the two-tiered table. It is only if you move to the far right-hand side of the painting (when facing it), and look at the painted floor from a tight angle, that the mess of white and black shifts into place before your eyes, and forms the shape of a giant skull.

Even in contemporary, secular art skulls remain (after all, we all have them), death remains, and all the symbolism that skulls carried in the past reverberates even today. Take the two most recent, famous skulls in art, two very different approaches: Gabriel Orozco’s Black Kites (1997) and Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God (2007).

One might assume that Orozco, who is Mexican, was referencing the Day of the Dead in this work—a real human skull which he spent months holding and drawing upon in pencil, in the shapes of squares, so the skull appears covered in a graphite and bone-white chess board (though the theoretically-even and consistent checkerboard pattern is contorted, as the squares bend around the contours of the skull). But Orozco disagrees, this is “an experiment with graphite on bone … The thing is a contradiction, really: a 2D grid superimposed on a 3D object. One element is precise and geometric, the other is uneven and organic. The two are not resolved.” It is certainly beautiful, and echoes the Capuchin ossuary chapels, in the communion of the artist, holding the skull of someone who once was, and drawing upon it—a thoroughly intimate act.

On the other hand, we have Damien Hirst mocking the commodification of art, by making what was the most expensive-to-produce artwork known (or so he liked to claim, though it’s a fair guess that works like the Colossus of Rhodes or the Athena Parthenos probably cost far more, in relative ancient world terms, than his 15 million GBP platinum skull encrusted with 8,601 diamonds). Hirst’s work is really the opposite of Orozco’s. Hirst’s skull is not real—it is a platinum sculpture onto which a ridiculous number of diamonds have been affixed. Hirst also did not make it himself, but commissioned a jeweler to do so. There is nothing actively human about For the Love of God, and perhaps that is part of Hirst’s point. In a 2008 interview about For the Love of God, Hirst said of death, “You don’t like it, so you disguise it or you decorate it to make it look like something bearable—to such an extent that it becomes something else.”

It is when the skull becomes not only something to fear, but also a friendly warning of life’s fleeting nature, that a universal symbol of death becomes a symbol of life. It is then that a skull is no longer just a lobe of bone, vacant sockets and remnant teeth, but a message loaded with additional, non-intrinsic meaning, then represented by human hand. Use the fear of death to inspire yourself to live life to the fullest. We have only so many grains of sand in our hourglass. In art, we can appropriate horror and make it our bone-winged ally, rallying us to seize the day.

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