Please scroll down to also read about Saul Leiter, awe inspiring photographer of many images on this site.
Barbara McClintock, Nobel Winning Biologist
There was exhibited as the great, the admirable, the most perfect object of mystic contemplation, an ear of corn that had been reaped in silence. Philosophoumena
“Over and over again she tells us one must have the time to look, the patience to ‘hear what the material has to say to you.’ Above all, one must have ‘a feeling for the organism.” Helen Fox Keller (B. McClintock’s biographer)1
Biologist Barbara McClintock won the Nobel Prize in 1983 for her research on corn genetics, much of which took decades to be
appreciated. Though admired at the beginning of her career, the more she developed her more “intimate” approach to her material, the more misunderstanding, rejection and even ridicule came her way. What she learned from the corn was beyond the comprehension of most of her colleagues.
Parker Palmer writes, “McClintock illumines the fact that we know by connecting with the world, not by disconnecting from it,”2 but while McClintock was “connecting” with the genetic material she studied, the rest of science, including psychology, was celebrating the findings of those experimenters who objectified and manipulated their subjects rather than “communing” with them.
A self-described “maverick”, she stood apart from mainstream science as her approach to her work included a mix of art and mysticism (though she was precise in her work and her data was impeccable. As Palmer observes, without this precision, “one does not win a Nobel Prize.”) 3
Though she did occasionally experience isolation, she was at the same time bridging and connecting divisions in a number of realms. Not only did she gain “valuable knowledge by empathizing with her corn plants, submerging herself in their world and dissolving the boundary between object and observer,” 4 she fused, in her work, different areas of biology as well, such as embryology, genetics and cytology. Her discoveries today, years after her death (in 1992), not only remain at the cutting edge of biology but continue to impact other scientific disciplines such as physics.
She was born on June 16, 1902, in Hartford Connecticut, the third daughter of Sara and Thomas McClintock. Her solitary nature as well as her independence were evident from the earliest age and her obvious fortitude as a four month old led her parents to change her name from Eleanor to what they considered to be the more “masculine” Barbara. 5
A significant memory for her was of around the age of six at Long Beach where the family vacationed during the summers. Alone in the evenings she discovered for herself a way of running, with her back completely straight, that allowed her to “float” without a sense of tiring. Later she read that this style of running was practiced by Tibetan Buddhist monks called “Running Lamas.” This is evidently when her interest in Tibetan Buddhism began.
Barbara McClintock was sometimes painfully aware she was different. But she didn’t let that get in the way of how she lived her life. “I would take the consequences for the sake of an activity that I knew would give me pleasure. And I would do that regardless of the pain – not flaunting it, but as a decision that it was the only way I could keep my sanity…Whatever the consequences, I had to go in that direction.” 6 Though something of a loner, she has been described as warm in one-to-one contacts and personable at social events.
She “viewed herself as a humanist, rather than a feminist, in expecting unprejudiced respect for herself and other women.” 7 She may have expected this, but that was not always forthcoming. Her “striking capacity for autonomy, self-determination, and total absorption” served her well in the face of the limitations for female scientists. Describing the situation for McClintock in her time, Keller writes, “women in the sciences tended to be scientific workers and teachers rather than scientists, pursuing science more as an avocation than a vocation…Positions in the universities that were open to women were for the most part limited to assistantships and, occasionally, instructorships. They might teach in the women’s colleges, or they might marry scientists and work in their husbands’ labs.”
Perhaps the positive side to her outer limitations was that while her male colleagues were becoming associate professors, McClintock was developing her incredible perceptive abilities as well as her “virtuoso technique.” 8 An essential part of this was her ‘feeling for the organism,’ which enabled her to see as she did.
“She herself cannot quite say how she “knows” what she knows. She talks about the limits of verbally explicit reasoning, she stresses the importance of her “feeling for the organism” in terms that sound like those of mysticism. But like all good mystics, she insists on the utmost critical rigor, and like all good scientists, her understanding emerges from a thorough absorption, even identification with, her material.” 9
She described how when she looked at a cell she “got down in that cell and look(ed) around.” Says Keller, “A hundred years ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: I became a transparent eyeball, I am nothing; I see all. McClintock says it more simply: “I’m not there!” 10
Though she wasn’t secretive about her mystical sense of life, neither did she speak much about it. One can hardly imagine a milieu more hostile to spiritual views of matter than mid 20th century mainstream science. “I couldn’t tell other people at the time because it was against the “scientific method.”…What we label scientific knowledge is “lots of fun. You get lots of correlations, but you don’t get the truth…Things are much more marvellous than the scientific method allows us to conceive.” 11
She described herself as always having had an “exceedingly strong feeling” for the oneness of things: “Basically, everything is one. There is no way in which you draw a line between things. What we (normally) do is make these subdivisions, but they’re not real. Our educational system is full of subdivisions that are artificial, that shouldn’t be there. I think maybe poets – although I don’t read poetry – have some understanding of this.” 12
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1 Keller, E.F. (2003) A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock. New York: Owl Books, p. 198
2 Palmer, P. (1998) The Courage to Teach: Exploring the inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, p. 54
3 Ibid., 55
4 Ibid
5 Keller, p. 20
6 Ibid., p. 28
7 Ibid., p. xiii
8 Ibid., p. 101
9 Ibid., p. xxi
10 Ibid., p. 118
11 Ibid., p. 203
12 Ibid, p. 204
* Except quotations by Palmer, all information here is from Keller’s biography on McClintock.
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March 8, 2010
Saul Leiter, Photographer
I hadn’t heard of Saul Leiter before his photograph Café, Paris (see home page) leapt off my computer screen at me when I was searching for images for this site. I knew instantly I was viewing a rare gem, though as it turns out, I wasn’t alone in my discovery. A lot of people still haven’t heard of Leiter, but at age 87, he is fast becoming a phenomenon – or rather, being recognized as the phenomenon that he is.
Whereas many are impressed when a painting looks like a photograph, with Leiter’s work, it is the opposite. Many of his photographs could be mistaken for paintings. I encourage you to look closely at his work – at the way he uses colour and composition much as a painter of the forties and fifties would have. He was a pioneer in the use of colour photography and in abstract photography in general, but there is a magic that goes even beyond his technical innovativeness. “For him the camera provided an alternate way of seeing, of framing events and interpreting reality. He sought out moments of quiet humanity in the Manhattan maelstrom, forging a unique urban pastoral from the most unlikely of circumstances.”[1]
As fascinating and compelling as his photographs is the man himself, and I am inspired to write about him here both because I want to spread the word about this incredible artist, and because I see him as a quintessential urban contemplative.
Saul Leiter was born in Pittsburgh in 1923. The son of a Talmud scholar who expected him to become a Rabbi, he moved to New York to be a painter, leaving theology school behind. He began exploring photography, shooting mostly street scenes, and around 1948 he discovered what would become the ideal vehicle for expressing his genius.
“I bought a roll of film one day and it was a roll of color…I had been doing black and white and I bought a roll of color and I used it and I liked it so I went on using it. That’s how it all began.” [2] He sometimes bought film that was past its expiry date because it created unusual colours and effects.
Going by the almost immediate recognition of his brilliance, one would have predicted artistic stardom at least equal to that of Diane Arbus, who was his contemporary and an acquaintance. But this did not happen and over the next fifty years he went largely unnoticed.
As he puts it, “I spent a great deal of my life being ignored. I was always very happy that way. Being ignored is a great privilege. That is how I think I learned to see what others do not see and to react to situations differently. I simply looked at the world, not really prepared for anything.”
Though he made his living as a fashion photographer (mostly black and white), he continued to roam the streets of New York, as well as Paris and London, capturing reality from his unique perspective – and storing it away until recently.
He explains, “There were people who looked down on color; it was considered inferior by some people to black and white. I don’t understand why. The history of art is very often the history of color.”
His work is now being described as “groundbreaking,” and “incredibly innovative,” and even though some of his photos are over fifty years old, as “pushing the boundaries of photography” even for our time. But something other than ambition motivated him. He did what he did for the pure enjoyment of it.
“No one has ever accused me of being a very clever career person…In order to have a career you have to want to have a career and have to be obsessed with having a career. I didn’t find that obsession attractive.”[3]
Perhaps the world is only now ready for Saul Leiter, as maybe we are becoming better attuned to what his life and his work have to say to us. He seems to speak to a cultural hunger and for what may be a growing spirit of our times:
“I remind people that there is a great deal of pleasure in looking at the world and enjoying simple things. That may not be the greatest ambition, but given the world we live in it’s not worth looking down on.”
A Link:
Youtube video of Saul Leiter’s photographs with music by Miles Davis:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3wSjuImGu0
Saul Leiter is represented by the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York City.
Photos in order:
Cafe, Paris 1959
Untitled (reflection) circa 1950-1959
Through Boards, 1957
[1] M. Harrison (author and editor) Saul Leiter: Early Colour, 2006. Steidl, Howard Greenberg Gallery.
[2] Evan Solocheck, A Lifetime in Colour (interview). Vital Source Magazine, 2006.
[3] Solocheck
All quotations from Early Colour except those that are noted as being by Solocheck.