The ACTINIC Photography Festival wraps up this week in the city of Edinburgh…

alternativephotographyscotland.org/

Countless Connecting Threads: MIT’s History Revealed Through its Most Evocative Objects hit the shelves this month. The book is by Deborah G. Douglas and Ariel Weinberg, and is the companion to the 2011 exhibit at the MIT Museum, MIT 150. Debbie is Curator of Science and Technology at the Museum, and directed the MIT 150 Exhibition. Ariel is the Curatorial Associate for the Science and Technology Collection. I photographed the objects for the accompanying website and an interactive display for the exhibition, and a lot of the photographs are now in this book. It’s a beautiful volume for anyone interested in science, technology, MIT, or history.

Here’s the overview copied from The MIT Press website, followed by some photos from the project. My descriptions are paraphrased from the MIT 150 Exhibition Website or the book.

“[T]hese countless connecting threads, woven into one indissoluble texture, form that ever-enlarging web which is the blended product of the world’s scientific and industrial activity.”

—William Barton Rogers, 1860, Objects and Plan of an Institute of Technology

Inspired by an exhibition of 150 objects created by the MIT Museum to mark MIT’s sesquicentennial, this lavishly illustrated volume is a unique collection of visual and written meditations about the making and meaning of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The story of MIT is more than a simple tale of a founder’s vision. It is greater than the sum of all the stories that have been or are yet to be told by the hundreds of thousands who have a direct personal connection with the Institute. Yet, with the assistance of the collective intelligence of the MIT community, the Museum was able to capture some of those “countless connecting threads”—from a towering module for the first real-time digital computer to the famous Baker House Piano Drop. Part history, part catalog, part souvenir, Countless Connecting Threads invites readers to (re)discover, through some of the Institute’s most evocative objects, the essence of the vast and varied tapestry that is MIT.

Model of tRNA’s Structure, Alexander Rich, 1973.

  

 

I have an exhibition of photographs that just opened at the MIT Museum, called 36 (Of Many) Pictures and Stories. Last year, the Museum commissioned me to photograph a wide array of artifacts for an exhibition commemorating their 150th anniversary. This show contains a selection of these images. It is located in the Compton Gallery under the Great Dome, and is scheduled to be ongoing. There is also a forthcoming catalog.