Cutting-edge science as you’ve never seen it before

By viewing scientists at work in the lab as artistic, creative figures, photographer Dan Stier has created a surreal series that shows researchers in a whole new light

A woman marches towards the camera on a sloping treadmill, fists clenched. Above her head is a muddle of electrical cabling; behind her are walls of tinny, zigzagged metal and surrounding her is a pervasive sense of the 70s B-movie. Her shimmering silver spacesuit and custard-yellow hood are garish and camp, reminiscent of Roger Moore's costumes in Moonraker. She looks like she's from the future, only it's a future dreamed up by Hollywood 40 years ago.

In fact, the year is 2009 and the woman is a scientist working at the Technical University in Dortmund, Germany. The room in which she is walking is a climatic chamber, designed to simulate precise environmental conditions and to gauge their effects on human subjects. Shot by Daniel Stier for his new book, Ways of Knowing, the photograph is one of 32 studies of laboratory interiors, all of which depict the cutting edge of modern science, only not as we are used to seeing it.

Continue reading...