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The gray substance of the medulla oblongata and trapezium Dean, John, M.D, 1864

The principal object in view, in the following memoir, has been to give the entire topography of the medulla oblongata and trapezium, with illustrations from a series of photographs.

(source)

Pam

MI5 staff member pictured on beach. This ordinary looking snapshot was taken and planted as part of a complex WWII intelligence plan known as Operation Mincemeat.

The intention was that this photograph would make other documents secreted with it seem more authentic. These documents, passed on to German agents after they were found on a body washed up on the coast of Spain (planted by British intelligence) suggested that the Allies were not planning an invasion of southern Europe via Sicily. This led to a weakening of German defence of Sicily which assisted the eventual Allied attack.

Jack Ryan. Moon/Color Spectrum, 2008
Archival digital print

More: Spectrum Study and Rainbow Moon

Lindsey Wixson by Walter Pfeiffer

adamferriss:

R. Buckminster Fuller at Black Mountain College by Nancy Newhall ca. 1948
Color Transparency

staceythinx:

If Ansel Adams was the best photographer of nature’s beauty, then Mitch Dobrowner may be the best photographer of nature’s ferocity.

Some photographs by Berenice Abbott

1. Wave Interference Pattern, 1950s
2. Focusing Water Waves, 1950s
3. Expanding Circular Waves, 1950s
4. Periodic Straight Waves, 1950s
5. Reflected Water Waves, 1950s
6. Reflected Water Waves, 1950s
7. Water Waves With Bubbles, 1950s
8. Soap Bubbles, 1946

Milk Drop Falling Into Reservoir of Milk by Harold Edgerton, 1935, printed later

via: Metropolitan Museum

Test Tube Shattering by Harold Edgerton, 1930s

Edgerton’s 1932 invention of the stroboscopic or electronic flash quickly effected a revolution in photography by enabling artists to work in locations and under conditions that had never before been possible. Although he himself was a scientist, Edgerton’s achievement with the camera secured his place as much in the history of photography as in science.

via: Metropolitan Museum

A Section of the Constellation Cygnus (August 13, 1885) by Paul and Prosper Henry

Astronomers at the Paris Observatory, the brothers Paul and Prosper Henry inherited in 1872 a project begun twenty years earlier—the mapping of the heavens by means of painstaking observation, calculation, and notation. In a dozen years they charted nearly fifty thousand stars. When, in 1884, their survey approached the Milky Way, the Henry brothers found that the cluster of stars proved far too dense and complex to chart by eye, and they constructed a photographic telescope to produce an exact, objective record of the sky.
That photography might serve astronomy was evident from the very beginning. Daguerre’s standard-bearer François Arago, director of the Paris Observatory, declared in July 1839 that the daguerreotype would eventually accomplish with ease the most delicate and difficult astronomical tasks, such as mapping the surface of the moon. Indeed, before the Henry brothers’ first use of the medium, other photographers had successfully charted lunar geology, solar and lunar eclipses, the transit of Venus, sunspots, the surface of Mars, the rings of Saturn, and the relative position of the brightest stars.
No one, however, had yet recorded stars so distant and faint that they were not visible to the eye. This the Henry brothers achieved in 1885 by constructing a still more powerful photographic telescope, with an extraordinarily precise mechanism for tracking the stars across the night sky during exposures as long as one hour. The resulting photographs, each seemingly infinite expanse showing but a three-degree section of the firmament, remain among the most sublime conceptions of scientific photography.

via: Metropolitan Museum

The Moon by John Adams Whipple, 1857–60

In December 1849, John Whipple made his first photograph of the moon, a daguerreotype taken through the telescope at the Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge. Although he did not make the first lunar photograph in America, in terms of accuracy and aesthetics Whipple produced what were internationally recognized as the most sublime photographs of the moon. This study, made with his partner James Black, recalls the maxim in astronomy: the more clearly one can see an object in space, the more beautiful it looks.

via: Metropolitan Museum

Dandelion [taraxacum officinalis] from Karl Blossfeldt’s Urformen der Kunst (1928-29), Wundergarten der Natur (1932) and Wunder in der Natur (1942).

via: Studio Botanika

Flora by Nick Knight

With Flora, the photographer Nick Knight reinvigorated the tradition of botanical photography initiated by Karl Blossfeldt in the 1890s. Each page of this elegantly designed volume contains a single image of a carefully selected botanical specimen from the Natural History Museum in London. These beautifully toned color photographs are presented in a manner that provokes curiosity in the natural world, and encourages detailed inspection of both the minutiae of the plant or flower, and of the unmistakable graphic tendencies of the image as a whole. Knight’s enthusiasm for seeing the familiar in a new light is complemented by the appendix of educational passages composed by the curator and botanist Sandra Knapp. The combination of the imaginary and the substantive, the artistic and the scientific, and the new and the old makes this book of photographs a fascinating addition to any art or botanical collection.

via: Totodo