Alice Rose George
Gary Schneider, SPERM. Platinum/Palladium print, Print size: 8 & 3/8 x 6 & 5/8, 1997.
Size of the original object: Head and neck is 5 microns. Specimen prepared by Michael Allen, Ph.D. Imaging Process: Nanoscope Atomic Force Microscope.
It’s a tulip, a lollypop, a mysterious thing from the underworld or from outer space – but, in fact, it is a photograph of a sperm from Gary Schneider’s Genetic Self Portrait. Gary is an explorative photographer, bred in the bowels of photographic chemicals and processes, the technical specifics complex. For me, this image, which sits on the shelf above my desk so that I encounter it endless times a day – looking up from my deafening computer world to its stunning shock of energy and beauty — reminds me of the essence and the abstraction of life. Viscerally, it is an edible tulip, wild with color in its gorgeous black and white; intellectually, it a reminder of all the seen and unseen mysteries.
Note: “Dr. Allen said that each of my sperm is unique and you see this most clearly at the head. I made a portrait of a sperm. A nanoscope makes a digital topographical map of the sperm by using a needle to measure the surface of the specimen. The lines it draws are so numerous that they come together and become invisible.”
