 |
| Volker Steger photo by Kurt Bauer |
Volker Steger is a science photographer based in Munich. His book, BUZZ: The Intimate Bond Between Humans and Insects, will be published by Chronicle in June 2004. BUZZ features over 100 of Steger's insect photographs, most taken with a scanning electron microscope. The text of BUZZ is written by Josie Glausiusz.
Martha Henry, program coordinator for the Knight Fellowships, asked Volker about his forthcoming book.
HENRY: Your forthcoming book, BUZZ: The Intimate Bond between Humans and Insects, is about bugs. Why bugs?
STEGER: They are so creepy-crawly. Bugs are all around us and influence our lives in so many ways. They rule the planet! And I like their modularity, a quite ingenious concept. All bugs are derived from a basic concept of an insect that developed quite some time ago. The amazing diversity of today’s bugs is just a result of modifying the very first model. No parts were added, none omitted, they were just modified.
HENRY: You use a scanning electron microscope to take many of your insect pictures. How does it work?
STEGER: It's a big contraption with a vacuum chamber, an electron beam and a computer. The beam scans the surface of the specimen in the vacuum chamber and the computer turns it into a black and white image. It’s just about the worst imaging device one can think of for biological specimens. Everything has to be dead and dry, or at least almost so.
HENRY: Where do you get your specimens?
STEGER: Bugs are everywhere! Just not the bugs I needed. The specimens in the book came from the hood of my car, a pest control company, a pharmaceutical conglomerate, a zoo, a university, a flea circus, the police of Bavaria, a dead dog, and the rotting leg of a diabetes patient.
 |
| Fly on car windshield |
As
you can imagine, it's not easy to get a specimen off a car hood without
ripping apart the corpse. And then you might also want the nice stains
next to the actual body—the gunk. The solution is to tape plastic foil
to the hood of the car and then cut out the dead bugs. The speed is
important—if one goes too fast, it’s all gunk. The right speed is about
70 km/h. Flies that get hit by a car at that speed look like fallen
angels in the electron microscope.
HENRY: How do you prepare the bugs to be photographed?
STEGER: Kill 'em, dry 'em, coat 'em. And make sure they don’t vomit all over themselves during the process.
To be photographed by an electron microscope, insects have to be dead and completely free of water, otherwise the water will evaporate in the vacuum of the specimen chamber and disrupt the electron beam. The killing is more difficult than it sounds, because one wants to catch the bug in flagrante, in the middle of eating, mating or whatever. Methods vary from bug to bug. Some prefer to be frozen by liquid nitrogen, some are okay with ether.
The dead dry bugs are coated with a conductive metal alloy, mostly platinum. They have to be electrically conductive so the electron beam can scan their surface without causing them to charge up and become little capacitators.
HENRY: The images from a scanning electron microscope are black and white, yet your finished photos for the book are colorized. How do you determine which colors to use?
 |
| Seven spotted lady bug eating an aphid |
STEGER: That is a hard one. I try to go for colors that look “natural” (earthy tones, not too much saturation), but that are not realistic. The viewer should have a way of telling the colors are not “real”. This is why the ladybug in the book has a brownish back rather than a bright red one.
HENRY: Why don't you just replicate the actual colors of the bug? Aren't you contributing to the Disney-fication of science journalism by using bright pinks and blues, rather than true-to-life colors?
STEGER: People should be able to see that the colors are fake. I don't use saturated colors any more since they actually do look Disneyesque. I try to pick colors that look good (I'm selling the images for money!) and that don't appear “natural,” but are not gaudy. I would really appreciate it if publishers would mention the fact that my images were colorized. They rarely do. Maybe readers have to become more “literate” about such things and treat images more like illustrations in their minds, instead of considering them to be representations of the truth. But I’m very pessimistic about that. Think of Susan Sontag’s book, On Photography. It was published so long ago and nothing has changed in the way people perceive images. People still believe what they see. Only fashions change. I have already recolored images I took a few years ago.
HENRY: Did any of your subjects completely repulse you? Did any bite you?
 |
| Necrobia larva |
STEGER: The cloth moths attacked my sofa, which was disgusting. I made them pay for this, believe me. I found the cockroaches repulsive when I had a transparent container with hundreds of them in my fridge. I also didn’t like maggots in the eyes of dead animals. And in the legs of living people.
HENRY: Your book is co-authored with Josie Glausiusz, who wrote the text. How did the collaboration work?
STEGER:
It worked very well. We worked out the themes of the chapters together.
I sent her the insect images around the themes. She dived into
literature and contacted scientists, sometimes the people who had given
me the specimen, sometimes others. Since she lives in New York City and
I live in Munich, this all went via e-mail. I was amazed there were so
many interesting anecdotes and so much cool science surrounding these
insects. We even have poetry in the book!
HENRY: Why did you become a science photographer? What kind of training do you have?
STEGER: I fell in love with light microscopy in the fifth grade. Sounds silly, but is still true. Let me use this opportunity to warn parents to give their children bad microscopes. With bad microscopes, children won't see anything interesting and will become lawyers.
 |
| Crickets fighting |
After graduation I was an apprentice to a then 83-year-old Bauhaus trained photographer whose images (most from 1920–40) I had to enlarge in the darkroom. That gave me some time to really look and I decided to learn other types of photography to add to the microscopy. I don't think one can be a photojournalist taking micrographs only. I wanted to become a Swiss Army Knife photographer, one who could employ various techniques for different stories.
Later I did another apprenticeship with a photomicrographer who owned a castle with damp walls in a beautiful setting. After that, a few semesters of biology and English at a university, followed by a job as a photo editor of a popular science magazine. I have been a freelance photographer since 1995.
HENRY: Which science photographers influenced you?
STEGER: Fritz Goro. He was a fashion photographer from Munich who left because of the Nazis and ended up in New York by way of Paris. He, in my opinion, invented magazine-style science photography. He worked a lot for LIFE magazine.
Also Doc Edgerton. I recently went to an exhibition about early science photography. I came across images taken by Austrian physicist Ernst Mach in the late 19th century. It was, indeed, high-speed images of flying bullets. So Edgerton didn’t invent high-speed photography. He was, however, a perfectionist with the rare gift of seeing the possibility for art where others saw only a technical problem.
And the people who used x-rays in the early days. And Lennart Nilsson, who took many fantastic images of human embryonic development—how the fetus becomes a baby. These are still spectacular images. His book, A Child is Born, is a classic.
HENRY: Whose work, among contemporary science photographers, do you admire?
STEGER: David Scharf (microscopy), Claude Nuridsany and Marie Perennou (the Microcosmos film), Stephen Dalton (pictures of insects in flight), Peter Menzel (the Robo sapiens book), Wolfgang Volz (he landed a job as Christo’s exclusive photographer after many years of shooting science).
HENRY: What do you think are the biggest clichÈs in science photography?
STEGER: Blue backgrounds that look “technical.” Scientists with funny goggles looking at fluorescent gels for genetics. An ant with a little cog for micro-engineering. The needle piercing a cell for genetic manipulation. Swarms of sperms heading for an egg as symbol for just about anything. People in bunny suits holding wafer disks for high-tech manufacturing. Portraits of Einstein for physics and invention (as much as portraits of Freud for psychology). The exploding Challenger spacecraft for failure of technology. The footprint on the moon. The flag on the moon as the first example of extra-terrestrial nationalism. Untidy cluttered labs as symbols of ingenuity. Badly dressed “nerds” and “geeks.”
We need these clichÈs, don’t we? Journalism rests firmly on them, calling them “symbols” which sounds nicer.
HENRY: What is your biggest frustration in working with scientists?
 |
| Blowfly hatching |
STEGER: Most have no visual mind. Sad, but true. Plus labs start to look ever more alike. A chap and a screen. I have also sometimes encountered the prejudice that photographers just want pictures and are not interested in the research. Some think photography is only for scientific documentation and “pretty pictures” are not really necessary. Still, most scientists are very helpful and nice, even willing to put in some time for a photo production once the ice is broken. Having a coffee together and some Polaroids usually helps. And it’s very important to really be interested in the story.
HENRY: Are there things you would like to photograph that are too technically difficult to accomplish?
STEGER: Yes! I would like to take a good picture of a rainbow at night. Maybe it has been done, but I haven't seen it. They exist.
HENRY: If you weren't a science photographer, what would you be?
STEGER: On the dole, I think. (Why don’t you ask me whom I would never want to meet in a sauna?)
HENRY: Whom would you never want to meet in the sauna?
Volker Steger was a 2000-01 Knight Science Journalism Fellow. His photographs have appeared in Discover, Popular Science, Wired, bild der wissenschaft (Germany), Newton (Italy, Spain, Japan), Illustreret Videnskap (Scandinavia), Ca m'intÈrÈsse (France), Muy interessante (Spain, Latin America), Focus (UK, Italy, Germany), and GEO (Germany, France). Steger was awarded a 2000 Visuell award for science photography, a 2000 Award of the German Press for science photography, and a 1996 LEICA award for science photography. If you would like to know whom he would never want to meet in a sauna, email him at volker.steger
 |
| Tick feeding on mouse |
Although most of the insect photographs were taken with a scanning electron microscope, Steger is a well-rounded science photographer who employs a variety of techniques. To see a full range of his work, visit his web site at www.stegerphoto.com/
All photos © copyright Volker Steger 2003. The images in this interview are colorized.
Click here for more Inside the Story interviews.
