Portraying the unglamorous side of scientific research

Daniel Stier has produced an eye-opening book of photographs depicting scientific research as it is performed by the multitude of scientists who don’t have access to the beautiful, gleaming laboratories depicted in magazines and film.

Courtesy: Daniel Stier

Courtesy: Daniel Stier

You can find this image along with more from volume one of Stier’s book, Ways of Knowing. According to Stier’s website (images from volume one), it is available for pre-orders.

Unfortunately, Stier doesn’t offer much information about the images he’s chosen to share from volume one but there is a June 12, 2015 article by Meg Miller for Fast Company that fills in a few blanks about the project and the image she’s chosen to highlight,

… “We think of lab coats, high-tech equipment—the realities couldn’t be more different.” In the Ergonomics department of the Technische Universitaet Munich, for example, Stier photographed a professor hanging horizontally from an aluminum structure, suspended by wires attached to velcro straps. He looks like he’s trapped in some sort of ’50s-era torture device. Science: glamorous, it ain’t.

It’s nice to be reminded from time to time that science is still practiced in homely and makeshift circumstances.

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