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6月22日 她称之为“现象”，而其他人则称之为艺术。She Calls It ‘Phenomena.’ Everyone Else Calls It Art.
When people call Felice Frankel an artist, she winces.
In the first place, the photographs she makes don’t sell. She knows this, she says, because after she received a Guggenheim grant in 1995, she started taking her work to galleries. “Nobody wanted to bother looking,” she said.
In the second place, her images are not full of emotion or ideology or any other kind of message. As she says, “My stuff is about phenomena.”
Phenomena like magnetism or the behavior of water molecules or how colonies of bacteria grow — phenomena of nature. “So I don’t call it art,” Ms. Frankel said. “When it’s art, it’s more about the creator, not necessarily the concept in the image.”
As first an artist in residence and now a research scientist at M.I.T., and now also a senior research fellow at the Institute for Innovative Computing at Harvard, she helps researchers use cameras, microscopes and other tools to display the beauty of science.
With her help, scientists have turned dull images of things like yeast in a dish or the surface of a CD into photographs so striking that they appear often on covers of scientific journals and magazines. According to George M. Whitesides, a Harvard chemist and her longtime collaborator, “She has transformed the visual face of science.”
One of her photographs, a vivid image of an iron-rich fluid under the influence of magnets, has been so widely reproduced that she is “sick of it,” Ms. Frankel said.
Her crucial step in making it was typical. She slipped a yellow Post-It note under the slide holding the fluid. In her view, the move did not materially alter the laboratory conditions, but it snapped the image of the fluid into such arresting focus that the National Science Foundation made a poster out of it.
In her book, “Envisioning Science” (M.I.T. Press, 2002), Ms. Frankel instructed researchers, in words and many pictures, in the kind of visual depiction of scientific processes and subjects she and Dr. Whitesides produced in an earlier book, “On the Surface of Things,” (Harvard University Press, 1997). Now they are finishing a book about “small things,” as Dr. Whitesides put it, things at the limit of what can be seen with light, even through the microscope.
Meanwhile, Ms. Frankel has been organizing conferences around the country on “Image and Meaning,” and working to establish a program sponsored by the National Science Foundation on the uses of visual imagery in teaching science. With colleagues, she is working to set up an online site where researchers can talk across disciplines about the concepts they want to convey in images.
But she does not feel that her photographs have to explain everything. “To me the idea is to engage somebody to look at something, and they don’t even know it’s science,” she said. “People are not intimidated by pictures. It permits them to ask questions.”
To achieve this goal, she sometimes alters the images. For example, when she photographed bacteria growing on agar, “the agar was cracking,” she said. “But I wanted the reader to pay attention to the bacteria pattern. So I digitally deleted the cracks.”
Another time, she photographed rod-shaped orange bacteria, and her film was somehow unable to reproduce the orange she could see when she looked through the microscope. “I added it,” she recalled.
These practices are acceptable, she said, because their purpose is not to disguise or twist scientific information, but to make it clearer. And when images like this appear in scientific journals, Dr. Whitesides said, the “untinkered original” is posted online with supplementary material.
For Ms. Frankel, the main point is that “I always tell the reader what I do when I manipulate an image.” And she negotiates with her research colleagues about how to go.
“I think this should be part of every scientist’s education, the manipulation and enhancement of images,” Ms. Frankel said. “To just have a blanket statement — ‘You cannot do anything to your image’ — that does not make sense.”
“You can get a little crazy with objectivity. If enhancing your image gets you to see something better,” it’s acceptable, she said, “as long as we indicate what we are doing.”
That’s what publications like Scientific American do when they use her work — they inform readers that the image in question has been altered, and how, said Mariette DiChristina, its executive editor.
But journal editors often have another issue with her. As Ms. DiChristina put it, if she gets a suggestion she does not like, “she has been known to balk forcefully.”
In the end, Dr. Whitesides said, “what comes out of it is a result one can be very happy with.”
For Ms. Frankel, 62, this work is a return to a major interest of her youth, when she studied science and aspired to a career as a chemist. Born Felice Oringel in Brooklyn, she attended Midwood High School and Brooklyn College, where she majored in biology. After graduation, she worked in a cancer research lab at Columbia. “Science has always been in my soul,” she said.
But life intervened. She married Kenneth Frankel. He was sent to Vietnam. When he returned, they moved to western Massachusetts, where he worked as a chest surgeon and they raised two sons.
But when Dr. Frankel returned from Vietnam, he brought a gift. “It was a very good camera,” Ms. Frankel said. “And that’s not trivial, that it was good.”
She started taking photographs. “Probably I was good,” she said, but because the camera was good, too.
“Technically, it worked,” she said. “So I was reinforced to continue taking pictures,” first as a volunteer at a public television station and then for an architect.
“I had a knack for it,” she said. “I didn’t like taking pictures of people that much, because you are too dependent on them to make a good picture. With architecture, you have to rely on your own sense of composition.”
Soon she began landscape photography, producing magazine photographs and, eventually, a book, “Modern Landscape Architecture: Redefining the Garden” (Abbeville Press, 1991). Then she landed a dream assignment, to travel the country photographing landscapes. It was a disaster.
“They wanted the Technicolor blue sky, the hot pinks, which was not what landscape was to me,” she said. “I took pictures of rain so you could see the sensuality of the design.”
She realized that she was, as she put it, “in the wrong spot,” and applied for a Loeb fellowship at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she spent the academic year of 1991-2 sitting in on university courses. “I lived at the Science Center, because I was hungry to get back into science,” she said.
One day, someone recommended a course in molecular biology, “and the fellow presenting the work was a terrific lecturer and very obviously visual in the way he presented the work,” she said. She introduced herself, and he invited her to his lab.
The professor was Dr. Whitesides. “We started talking about how one represented science on the blackboard,” he recalled, “and at some point she made the remark that she thought we did it badly and I said, ‘Well, you show us how to do it better,’ and we were off and running.”
One of the first photographs she made in his lab, water droplets arrayed on a slide with a water-repellent grid, ended up on the cover of the journal Science.
Since then, Dr. Whitesides said, “her impact on scientific communication has been very large, in the way science talks to science and science talks to the world outside science.”
Beyond that, he added: “She has a wonderful sense of design and color. It is hard to say she is not an artist.”
她称之为“现象”。而其他人则称之为艺术。
每当人们把弗利丝·弗兰克尔称为艺术家时，她总会皱眉蹙额。 首先，她所拍摄的照片不用于销售。她说这个她知道，因为1995年她获得古根海姆基金奖之后，就开始将作品送入画廊。“没有人愿意不厌其烦地看，”她说。
其次，她的照片并非满是情感、思想或其他别的信息。如她所言：“我的作品都是关于现象的。” 像磁力现象或水分子的状态或细菌菌落如何生长等现象——都是自然现象。“因此，我没有把它称为艺术，”弗兰克尔说。“如果说它是艺术，那更多的是说创作者，不一定是说图片中的思想。”
弗兰克尔原是住在麻省理工学院里的一名艺术家，现在是一名从事研究工作的科学家，还是哈佛大学创新计算学院的高级研究员。她帮助研究人员利用照相机、显微镜和其他工具来展示科学之美。 在她的帮助下，科学家们将各种事物索然无味的形象，像盘子里的酵母或CD的表面，变成了引人入胜的照片，经常刊登在科学期刊和杂志的封面上。哈佛大学化学家、弗兰克尔的长期合作者乔治·M·怀特塞兹说：“她改变了科学的外观形象。” 她的一幅作品——富铁液体受磁铁影响下的生动画面——被广泛地复制，弗兰克尔说，自己都“对它感到厌恶了”。
她拍摄这幅作品的关键性一步很具有代表性。她将一张黄色的利贴便条塞入放置液体的载波片下面。在她看来，这一举动并没有在实质上改变实验室的状况，但却将流体的形象摄入镜头之中，引人入胜，美国国家科学基金会因此把这张照片做成了一幅海报。
在她的著作《展望科学》（麻省理工学院出版社，2002年）中，弗兰克尔女士用文字和大量图片对研究人员进行指导，这种方法形象地描述了她和怀特塞兹博士在一本早期著作《物体表面的奇观》中（哈佛大学出版社，1997年）提出的科学方法和科学论题。现在，他们正在完成一本关于“小物体”的书，用怀特塞兹博士的话说，就是在光线下——甚至通过显微镜——可见的物体极限。 同时，弗兰克尔女士还在全国组织召开关于“影像与意义”的会议，致力于在国家科学基金会的资助下设立关于在教学科学中运用视觉影像的项目。 她与同事们一道，致力于网站建设，研究人员可以就他们想通过影像传达的概念进行跨学科的交流。
但是，她并不认为她的摄影作品非得对一切都做出解释。“我就想吸引人们去观察某些物体，他们甚至不知道这是科学，”她说。“人们不会被图片吓着。这样他们就可以提出问题。”
为达此目的，她有时会对图像加以修改。比如，她拍摄长在琼脂上的细菌，“琼脂开裂了，”她说。“但我想让读者把注意力集中到细菌菌谱上。于是我利用数码技术删除了裂缝。”
还有一次，她拍摄棒状柑橘菌，她的胶卷不知为什么，无法拍摄到她通过显微镜所看到的橘子。“我就把它给添加上去了，”她回忆说。
这些做法都是可以接受的，她说，因为他们的目的不是掩盖或歪曲科学知识，而是使科学知识更加清楚易懂。一旦这种图片刊载在科学期刊上，怀特塞兹博士说，“那未经加工的原稿”就会和补充资料一起被贴到网上。
对弗兰克尔女士来说，重要的是“我总是要告诉读者，我在处理图片的时候都做了什么。”而且她和与她一起共事的研究人员共同协商如何处理图片。
“我认为，这应该是每一位科学工作者所接受教育的分内之事——处理和改善照片，”弗兰克尔女士说。“不管怎么说——‘你不能对图片进行任何处理’——这没有任何意义。” “你可以对客观性有所痴迷。如果对图片加以改善，你觉得看起来更好，”那就可以接受，她说，“只要我们对自己做的一切加以说明。”
像《科学美国人》这样的杂志采用她的作品时就是这么做的——他们告知读者，这张照片被调整过了，是如何调整的，该刊物的执行编辑马里耶特·迪克利斯提纳说。 对62岁的弗兰克尔女士来说，这幅作品回到了她年轻时代的主要兴趣上，当年她学习科学，立志做一名化学家。弗兰克尔出生于布鲁克林，就读于中木高中和布鲁克林学院，学习生物学。毕业后，她在哥伦比亚一家癌症研究实验室工作。“科学一直占据着我的心，”她说。
但是生活发生了变化。她嫁给了肯尼思·弗兰克尔。他被派到了越南。
弗兰克尔博士从越南回来的时候，带回一件礼物。“是一台非常棒的照相机，”弗兰克尔女士说。“可不能小看它，那可是真棒。” 她开始拍摄照片。 “从技术上来讲，它很棒，”她说。“所以，我感到很顺手，继续拍摄照片，”起先是在一家公共电视台做志愿者，后来为一名建筑设计师工作。 不久，她就开始从事风光摄影，为杂志拍摄照片，并且最终出版了一本《现代景观建筑：园林的重新定义》（阿贝维也尔出版社，1991年）。后来，她实现了一个愿望，周游全国拍摄风光。这是一次大失败。
“他们想要彩色的天空，桃红色的，在我看来这不是风光，”她说。“我拍摄雨天的照片，你可以看到设计的情感。” 她意识到——如她所言——自己“误入歧途”，于是就申请了哈佛大学研究生设计学院的娄伯奖学金，在那里度过了1991-1992一学年，参加大学课程。“我住在科学中心，因为我渴望重新走入科学，”她说。
一天，有人推荐一门分子生物学课程，“展示作品的那个人是一名非常棒的老师，而且展示的方法带有非常明显的视觉效果，”她说。她做了自我介绍，他便邀她到自己的实验室。 这位教授就是怀特塞兹博士。“我们开始讨论该如何在黑板上描述科学，”他回忆说，“其间，她提出她认为我们做得不好。我说：‘那你告诉我们怎样做会更好，’我们俩讨论个不停。”
她在实验室拍摄的第一批作品中，有一幅画面是排列在带有防水网格的载波片上的水滴，后来刊登在《科学》杂志的封面。
怀特塞兹博士说，从那时起，“她对科学传播的影响就非常大，影响了科学界的对话方式以及科学界与外界的对话方式。”
此外，他还说：“她具有非常出色的设计感和色感。说她不是一名艺术家，很难。”
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