The power of science and human imagination

Post - The Gift of Human Imagination

This is the space shuttle Discovery, one of the five vessels that the NASA has launched into space and back between 1981 and 2011. Recently, I had to a chance to see an exhibition of this original at the National Air and Space Museum near Washington. Seeing the shuttle in real life was a mind blowing experience.

What strikes me about space exploration goes beyond the fact that mankind successfully traveled into the orbit dozens of times. It’s about the incredible speed at which all of this developed. It was only in 1903 that the Wright Brothers invented motorized flight. In 1969, only 66 years later, mankind stepped onto the surface of the moon and another 12 years until the space shuttle program started flying humans into space and back.

To me, this space vessel is a symbol of what a collective of human beings is capable of achieving when science meets passion, imagination and last but not least political willpower: We can engage in unprecedented endeavors where the impossible becomes possible. Let’s not just take the technology we now live with for granted but understand that at the beginning of all technological revolution stands science and imagination. We can shape this future with our work.

Tension

I recently revisited an art museum in southern Germany, in which I haven’t been for 4 years. The collection was basically the same, yet I was surprised by how beautiful the interior architecture went together with the paintings and sculptures, something I hadn’t noticed back then. The place had a sense of cleaness and homogenity, particularly in terms of lightning, such as I had never noticed anywhere elsed. A week later I went there again, this time alone, to capture the marvelous compositions that this “artificial” place had to offer.

The composition above strongly caught my attention. In a gallery, artworks are usually presented in a very pure environment, making it easy for a photographer to get clean shots. This picture made me finally understand what some artists, Kandinsky in particular, mean when they say “tension”. Continue reading “Tension”

Frozen Decisive Instant

Photography inside museums is a strange subject.There are a lot of museums in the world who forbid photography. Sometimes it’s in order to protect the works from people who can’t manage to turn their flashlight off, sometimes it is to protect the authors property rights (why not take a nice picture of that painting on the wall). Is there any point of photographing art in a museum? Continue reading “Frozen Decisive Instant”