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perspectivesWildly DivergentPhotos+Physics=Meaning By David Strasburger, science facultyIphotograph with a view camera,the big old thing with black bellows,where you put your headunder a dark cloth at the back tolook at the world projected upsidedown on ground glass. Some years I bringit to class when we study optics, as a wayto talk about lenses with my students.I have taught physics at Nobles fornearly 20 years. For most of that time,I have also made photographs. Art andphysics are, at least outwardly, radicallydifferent disciplines. Even if we leavealone the subject matter, artists andphysicists have wildly divergent cultures,speak different languages, and have differentrules of discourse. But I want totell you how, for me at least, art and physicshave similar roles. I have to get a littleabstract for a moment, but if you bearwith me, I think it will make sense.According to composition theoristAnn Berthoff, “writing is thinking.” Shemeans that when we write, we are notmerely recording ideas that were alreadyfully formed inside us before we wrotethem. We don’t simply reify thoughtson paper so that other people can knowwhat we think. The very act of writingconstitutes thinking. In writing wearticulate, we connect, we complete, wecreate. I believe that the same principleapplies to other kinds of expression aswell. When we paint, dance or photograph—orfor that matter calculate, estimateand derive—these are not merelyacts of communication.The day after a meteor broke up overChelyabinsk, Russia, I had a lively conversationwith my friend and colleagueDominic Manzo. We were as awestruckas everyone else by the videos of thevapor trail and the breaking glass. Wealso wondered how much worse it wouldhave been in the case of a ground impactinstead of an airburst. Could we figurethis out on our own? We knew preciousfew details, pretty much just an estimateddiameter of the bolide. But thereis a strategy physicists often use in thesesituations called a “Fermi estimate.” Webreak one big unknown into many smallerunknown but guessable quantities. Aswe talked, we started scribbling numberson a whiteboard. Fifteen minutes and alot of ink later, we had guessed that thedisaster would have been on the scale of10 Hiroshima bombs.But why did we write while we talked?It’s a physics thing. In my college physicsbuilding, there were chalkboardseverywhere—in hallways, lounges andoffices—not just in lecture halls. In theacculturation process, I soon learnedthat in physics we write when we talk,and we write when we think. Bookkeepingis part of it; writing helps us keeptrack of the bits and pieces. But thereis also this: When we write, we becomeaware of things we hadn’t realizedbefore. When Dom and I were donewith our estimate, we didn’t just have aguess about the awful (if hypothetical)consequences of a meteor impact, wealso saw how sensitive that outcome is tothe meteor’s diameter: There is a worldof difference between a 10-meter bolideand a 20-meter bolide.In July 2000, a lobster boat droppedme (and my crates of photo gear) on asmall island in Maine’s Penobscot Bay.With the support of a professionaldevelopmentgrant from Nobles, andafter encouragement (and prodding)from Joanna Swayze, then head of theNobles visual arts department, I wasat an artists’ retreat with the goal ofunderstanding landscape photography.Landscapes felt like a puzzle to me. TheSierra Club calendars that I grew up withwere pretty, but why? And does prettymatter? What did photographers see inlandscape? What did landscape mean?There were maybe a dozen painters26 Nobles spring 2013
“I have read that as humans we are hardwiredfor narrative. We crave the coherence and closureof characters, conflict and resolution. For betteror for worse, stories are how we make sense ofthe world.” —strasburgeron the island, and then there was Walter,an accomplished professional photographerwho generously helped me as Ifumbled with the elaborate routines ofworking my big camera. He also kickedme out of bed at four in the morning. Hesaid it was crucial to start shooting halfan hour before sunrise, and then to quitafter an hour. “The light’s no good therest of the day,” he explained. So it wasbecause of him that after a mile’s darkstumble, I was shivering damply in thepredawn mist on a roughcobble beach with my headunder a black cloth when, tomy surprise, landscape photographystarted to makesense to me.A group of pines clumpedtogether on a knoll thathumped up out of the shinglelike an island on an island. Bleachedtrunks tangled where they had been laidlow by winter storms. Yards away, thebeach became a rocky spit that disappearedinto the ocean. Framing the viewin sequence—trees, rocks, ocean—thelandscape suddenly seemed to tell a storywith the pines as characters and clumpsof dried seaweed as a supporting cast.Even now, more than 10 years later,I mostly make photos that are drivenby some kind of story, real or imagined,decipherable or obscure.I have read that as humans we arehardwired for narrative. We crave thecoherence and closure of characters,conflict and resolution. For better or forworse, stories are how we make sense ofthe world. That sense-making has to happentwo separate times: Once for the storyteller,and again for the story’s listener.And this is where these circles start tointersect and entangle: In physics class,I often tell stories to help students try toattach meaning to what must sometimesfeel like intellectually spartan fare. Atthe same time, I hope to be giving themlanguage to work out the mechanisms ofthe world around them, using physics towrite significance into being. Meanwhile,in my own artistic practice, I use imagemaking to ask the kinds of questions forwhich I do not have equations.spring 2013 Nobles 27
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