Seeing Science: How Photography Reveals the Universe

Marvin Heiferman's second major anthology after Photography Changes Everything turns its attention to the relationship between photography and scientific knowledge, gathering images from astronomy, medicine, forensics, biology, geology, and climate science alongside short texts by scientists, photographers, historians, and critics. The book spans the full history of scientific imaging from nineteenth-century chronophotography to satellite imagery and contemporary microscopy, organizing its material thematically rather than chronologically. Each section takes up a domain of scientific inquiry and asks how photography has shaped what can be known, measured, and communicated within it.

The contributors include scientists working across disciplines alongside photography historians and critics, making the book genuinely cross-disciplinary rather than simply illustrative. Heiferman is interested in the photograph not as a passive record of scientific observation but as an active tool that has changed what scientists look for and what counts as evidence. Published with the Smithsonian Institution.