How Science is Pictured in the Media and Public Culture

This joint Reading the Pictures/UMBC SEEING SCIENCE Salon is a conversation about science as a social agenda and how science images are being portrayed in visual culture.

If photography was invented so that the sciences could communicate with each other, now it’s as much about making that investigation relevant to consumers, investors and alternately curious, fearful or enthralled citizens. This discussion is interested in science as a social agenda and a media phenomenon. It’s about the popularization of science, the attitude and approach on the part of science toward its own activities and what the general public sees of it. 

The Reading the Pictures Salon series brings together experts on visual culture to converse about and analyze a group of ten news and media photographs in an online discussion format. This Salon is being jointly produced with Reading the Pictures and UMBC as a component of SEEING SCIENCE, the  year-long project exploring the role photography plays in shaping, representing, and furthering the sciences.  

Who:  Our distinguished panel includes: Rebecca Adelman UMBC Professor of Media & Communication Studies; Ben de la Cruz, Multimedia Editor, Science Desk, NPR; Marvin Heiferman Curator, Project Director “Seeing Science”; Corey Keller – Curator, SFMOMA; Kurt Mutchler – Senior Editor, Science, Photography Department, National Geographic; and Max Mutchler, Space Telescope Science Institute, Hubble Heritage Project manager. The HangOut will be moderated by University of Maine professor and visual scholar, Nate Stormer.

The images: The panel will analyze the ten key photos carefully culled from thousands of media images across sixteen categories of science. (Fifty more images will also be presented on the Reading the Pictures Twitter and Instagram feeds in the three weeks leading up to the panel discussion, and then added to this post after the event.)

The salon will take place on the Google HangOut platform accommodating live audio and video with involvement from viewers via live chat. 

Registration is open now and required to watch and participate in the salon.

(Photo: Daniel Stier, From Ways of Knowing, 2015.)