What does studying photography in Florence, Italy have to do with my college narrative or career path? The answer, simply, is everything and nothing at all. I am majoring in Biology and most of my coursework has been in Physics, Chemistry and Biology, with a path toward a career as a physician scientist. But I hope to be more than a physician or a scientist. I will be a citizen of the world. Outside of the lab, I will engage in the world of art, theater, music. This is why I have chosen to study at the William E. Macaulay Honors College, a humanities-based program that uses the vibrant culture of New York City as its classroom. I have benefited from this premier liberal arts education — from the seminars, the lectures, the trips to museums and other cultural institutions. In addition to enhancing my cultural fluency, exposure to a diverse palette of course material, more simply, and more profoundly, has taught me how to think critically. Honing these skills, a prerequisite for good learning, is the cornerstone of any academically challenging and enriching program.
After sharing in the cultural experiences of New York City, I would now like to study in another great city of the world. The setting for this program played a crucial role in my decision to apply for this program, Florence. It will allow me to get to know the city well, as I immerse myself in the pulse of everyday life, learn its history, and the many stories it has to tell. I will see the great works that have influenced the art I have come to love in the museums at home. Florence, was home to Leonardo DaVinci who said, “Study the art of science. Develop your senses–especially learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.” This extraordinary man of art and science recognized the important connection between the two subjects, that one often mirrors another, and, thus, will allow me to make a more sound argument for combining the study of biology in Brooklyn College and art in Florence.
In fact, it has become increasingly common in medical schools today for the study of art to be required. Randy Kennedy reported in the New York Times that the Yale, Stanford, Cornell, and the Mount Sinai Schools of Medicine have all added a mandatory art-appreciation or other humanities course to their medical school curricula (4/17/06). Kennedy said that, “[these art courses are] partly intended to make better doctors by making better-rounded human beings. . .[which] in some medical schools. . . [are] whole humanities departments — that bring playwrights, poets, actors, philosophers and other imports from the liberal arts into the world of medicine.” A study, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in 2001, reported that looking at painting and sculpture can improve medical students’ observational abilities. JAMA is known for its artistic covers, often on themes unrelated to medicine. Another article from the Times (Polly Shulman, 10/5/99) quoted Dr. M. Therese Southgate, the physician who has selects JAMA’s cover art, ”I don’t use many overtly medical scenes. I’m trying to show that everything is related: art, medicine, life. Physicians and other people in the field can enjoy art, whether it’s medical or not.”
My particular artistic interests are in photography. I find myself looking at a scene and taking a pictures of it in my mind’s eye, wondering what light settings I would use, at what angle, how the final photograph would look. In high school, I studied graphic design for two years. I later used those skills as the editor-in-chief of my school’s newspaper. I became aware how important digital photographs are in the media. I also learned how to “fix” photos and that many images in the media are also often doctored. Graphic design, and art in particular, continued to intrigue me, but I pursued science as a major. Still, before I began my undergraduate work, I told myself that I would not graduate without taking a photography class. That was almost three years ago and those classes just never fit in my schedule. In my freshman Macaulay Honors seminar, Art in New York City, we studied a unit on photography. A trip to the Brooklyn Museum to see an Annie Leibowitz exhibit was a tease to me. It reminded me that photography was something I always wanted to do, but likely would never pursue as a career. The images I saw still haunt me: a bathroom stained with the bloody handprints of children, genocide victims; Susan Sontag at breakfast with her daughter, just months before she died from cancer; the famous picture of Demi Moore, naked and pregnant. All these photographs, the tool, the camera the same, the mood so different. Famous people, anonymous people, rich, poor, all immortalized. A photograph is a record, a point in time that presupposes a before and an after, I learned when we read John Berger’s Another Way of Telling. I want to make my own record, my own history of the world as I see it, to tell a story with befores and afters that other people will make people wonder or understand. During that same semester, I took my own photographs for a photo-essay assignment. The professor had encouraged us to experiment and I did. Instead of printing my photographs on regular paper, I printed them on muslin cloth, to complement the art-and-crafts theme of the pictures I took of my grandmother knitting. I sewed these to pieces of her handiwork.
The class syllabus for the study abroad program includes discussions of “elements of photo composition and graphic design, photo history, and relationships with other art mediums.” Art, by its nature, is creative. Nature, and its study, is art. What I have discovered in the short time that I have been involved with science research, is that it requires creativity, too. The standardization of medicine and research does not take away from the imagination needed to achieve innovation.