Street Photography nominee

San José, California is the Capital of Silicon valley but it was once referred to as the Valley of the Hearts Delight. The later moniker speaks to the history of San José, which is that of an incredibly rich farming region. During the 1950s and ‘60s San José’s population grew nearly ten times in size, transforming farmland into high-tech firms.

Given San José’s contributions to inventing technologies that change culture, politics, and governments it is thought of as a place that invents the future. However, this area has very few markers of its young history. This series aims to capture this transitional period through architecture when San José underwent rapid urbanization.

To accentuate feelings of the past I use the frame of the film stocks. Advancements in digital photography are a direct repercussion of the technologies built in Silicon Valley. The image as a product was once captured in crystals and celluloid, now it primarily exists as representation of software code. The physicality of the film serves as a reminder of San José’s roots.

Neuroscientists play an integral part in culture but the public knows little about how science is done, who does it or why it’s important. One consequence of opaque scientific work is the inability to see which individuals are conducting their research, their personal stories, and their motivations to help reveal the complexity of the nature we are imbued by.

These images were captured with a compact large format camera using experimental New55 PN instant film. The opaqueness of the positive (left) represents the raw data collected by scientists on their quest to understand nature. The inverted negative (right) represents how scientists reveal nature through filtering data, beautifying imagery, and at times removing unwanted, but captured information.

All scientists are part of the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.