Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service's Blog

A Conversation with Michael Benson

On Tuesday, our team of writers and editors, project directors and press people finally met artist Michael Benson face-to-face. We've been working with him for the last two years on an uber-ambitious space imaging exhibition called Beyond: Visions of Planetary Landscapes (If you follow our blog, I've gushed about this one on previous occasions.)

It was the first time I had an opportunity to get to the bottom of his story, both personally and professionally. With a background in photography and film-making, this self-proclaimed 2001: A Space Odyssey aficionado is a fascinating guy with big plans for the future. Here's what he had to say:

Q. How did you go from making politically minded films like Predictions of Fire (1996) to collaging together images taken by the space probes?
A. There were delays on one of my other films, and I started as a kind of hobby in the mid 1990s. Those, of course, were the days before search engines like Google, but somehow I managed to find NASA's Planetary Photojournal. The website included lots of partially completed images that were taken by Galileo, and new images were coming through all the time.

Q. What's your goal in creating the images?
A. I try to imagine what these things would look like to a human being if we could somehow hover above the surfaces. We see full views, not pieces. These images give a more complete representation than anything that we've seen before. In fact, the image of the Mars dust storm and the photo of Europa above Jupiter were made up of hundreds of individual frames that I pieced together, giving incredibly comprehensive and sweeping views.

Q. Take a long time?
A. Yes, months and months. Six months in the case of the Jupiter view. I just kept adding more and more frames.

Q. Where does the color come in?
A. Getting the color "right" requires help from scientists. I've worked closely with Dr. Paul Geissler, literally a rocket scientist, to render these pictures into what we believe is true color. But it's not an arbitrary process.

Q. Having spent years on Beyond, what's next for you?
A. I've started thinking about a companion book (to Beyond: Visions of the Interplanetary Probes) called something like "Far Out." It will pick up where this book leaves off, moving out of the solar system and into deep space, looking at nebulae, galaxies, and deep-space phenomena.

The team is especially interested when they hear about this next endeavor as project director Devra Wexler chimes in with a more fitting title for this next book. It should be called "Beyond Beyond," she grins.

Have another minute? Check out the Beyond photoalbum in the left column.

What on Earth?

What's the name of the exhibition?
Caves: A Fragile Wilderness

What's the picture?
It's called "Neverland" and is a geologic feature from a New Mexico cave. Photo by Dave Burnell

>>See the whole picture

Scanner Photography

Transitions: Photographs by Robert Creamer is no ordinary photography exhibition. In fact, at one point we weren't even sure if the term "photograph" was the right word for Bob's innovative imagery. There's no camera involved, and I'm not describing paintings or drawings. So what are we talking about?

Creamer's images of natural specimens such as flowers, feathers, and animal bones are rendered by a high-end flatbed scanner. The artist/scientist (he considers himself an artist first, but once you see the images, his passion for scientific detail is obvious) lays out elaborate compositions on his glass "canvas" and then uses the technology to produce large-scale, absolutely stunning pictures. Creamer's focus for this exhibition is the process of change that occurs to organic objects over time.

Just before Transitions went on the road with SITES, I chatted with the artist about his technique, his subject matter, and his love of everything natural. Here's what he had to say:

Q. Why use a scanner? Why not a nice, new digital camera?
A. The scanner does remarkable things. The light source is always straight on, making everything look like it was painted with an artist's sense of perfect light refraction. The scanner creates a drop shadow as it illuminates, and suddenly, the light falls off into total darkness. Everything in the picture is crisp and sharp. With a traditional camera the process of capturing something is reductive, trying to record large objects and fit them into a small camera frame. With the scanner, it's like starting with a naked blank slate. This process is totally additive and constructive.

Q. What is it about these images that appeals to viewers?
A. The audience is drawn to the detail in these images. People find the colors to be very curious, wondering whether or not they are accurate. As flowers breakdown, they change color, and the scanner renders those hues as they appear in nature.

Q. What's your favorite subject matter?
A. Irises are my favorite subject because they constantly surprise me. Recently, my daughter's boyfriend brought me an assortment of irises which I put directly into the freezer. When I took the irises out of deep freeze, I broke them apart and placed them on sheets of glass. To my dismay, the freezing destroyed the character of the flowers, including the color, the texture, and the tissues themselves. Instead, the flowers became a gelatinous mush. I was getting ready to trash the entire project when I noticed that mold had started to form on the glass slides. Serendipity. The intricate web of dark mold was ripe with possibilities.

Q. I guess you're never at a loss for things to scan?
A. Everything I do creates a new beginning, and I will never run out of source material. I think three, four, ten project ahead. How about trying seashells, rocks, or something entirely different? But timing is everything. Depending on the object or specimen, I may wait for weeks or even months for the subject to be just right.

Q. Where do you collect most of your specimens?
A. The lotuses [in my images] came from Lilypons Water Garden, near Frederick, Maryland. The irises came from the Botanical Gardens in Florida, and the bones from the Nature Center [a Smithsonian affiliate] in Virginia. I also have a greenhouse at home where I tend to live plants. Outside, there are drying racks for specimens. Inside the house, my wife and kids ask, 'Can we throw this away?' 'No, I'm not done with that yet!' The conversation at dinner usually includes something like, 'Dad took over another room in the house!' The point is just to see what happens with an object.

Bob Creamer teaches digital photography at Catonsville Community College near Baltimore, Maryland. He also teaches digital and traditional photography at the Old Field School in Baltimore.