Science is one of the least examined modes of representation in mainstream culture. True, science fascinates, and there are numerous examples of our predilection for a good discovery story or a "gee whiz" science education program. Just open Tuesday’s "Science Times" each week in the New York Times, or take a look at the programming on National Geographic, the Public Broadcasting System, or the Discovery Channel .

Our excitement about scientific achievement sells, even if it does not always buoy the intellect. In contrast, a recent contemporary exhibition approached the imagery and rhetoric of one of the most famous contemporary science undertakings, the Human Genome Project. Paradise Now, held two years ago at Exit Art Gallery in New York City, featured some compelling work within a marginally critical context. A few other recent exhibitions, such as Out of Sight: Imaging/Imagining in Science at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in 1998 and Beyond Appearances: Imagery in Science at the Binghamton University Art Museum in 2000, provided overviews of science-related images in an engaging manner. On the whole, however, we the non-scientific public take for granted our ongoing relationship to science. We recognize the power of science, yet do little to question its practices.

Why? Well, there are strong conceptual deterrents from doing so. Science is vast, spanning dozens of disciplines: from anthropology to forensic pathology to molecular biology to physics to zoology. Just consider the breadth of two major publications, the weekly magazines Science and Nature. While science is vast in its purview, the discourse contains a unifying set of methods of gathering quantitative data, organizing it in similar fashion across disciplines, and presenting it as unequivocally true. Couple these methods with highly-specialized, constantly-evolving technical production, and critical public intervention or even response to science becomes difficult in the face of such a vast, expert culture.

Still, science, or the popular notion of it, underpins some of our most banal and stellar activities. Everything from the rationale for taking aspirin for a headache to the explanation for the means of putting a man on the moon is based on the "triumphs" of science. In short, science shapes our understanding of the world by serving as the basis of a particular kind of truth.

But the imagery of science shapes us in other ways. The very notion of personhood, filtered through biology-based representations, weighs heavily in determining who we are. Examining the imaging practices of science, especially as they relate to human subjectivity, serves as a foundation for what curator and writer Carol Squiers, at the International Center for Photography (ICP), has been producing for the past two years.

Under the series title Imaging the Future, Squiers has already executed two shows at ICP. The premiere exhibition, Perfecting Mankind: Eugenics in Photography from 1870 to 1940, opened in January 2001 and emphasized eugenics’ ongoing claim on our imaginations. The presentation of historical imagery from the "Fitter Family" and the "Better Baby" campaigns of the early to mid-20th century served as trenchant reminders of our propensity to classify, and of the implications of a human classification system based on race and ethnic characteristics. The second exhibition, Foreign Body: Photography and the Prelude to Genetic Modification, opened this past February, and revealed historic photographs of fantastic bodies of all kinds, accompanied by beautifully-composed expository labels. Both exhibitions maintain a tension between the historical imagery they present and a contemporary dialogue concerning the biological basis of human identity.

Squiers stands out among her peers because of the in-depth research she conducts and the choice of content in her work. In the case of Imaging the Future, hers is not simply a project organizing artwork that responds to or embodies certain scientific themes, such as our identities as represented by a set of four amino acid repeats in the nuclei of our cells. Rather, Squiers’ curatorial practice examines science as a rich representational domain through which we can track the shaping of human identity. This is not surprising. Squiers is known for examining the kind of imagery—corporate photography, headline news photos, advertising imagery—that other curators and writers have overlooked. Perhaps this is why ICP invited her to undertake the series.

A third exhibition in the series at ICP will occur in January 2003, in time for what promises to be a grand celebration of an important, if singularly overrated, scientific milestone: the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA.

Finally, the last of the series, slated to occur late in 2003, is the exhibition I anticipate with the most curiosity, because so few people have ever approached science in this manner. Called The Art of Science, it is an exhibition designed to inquire how the field of science—scientists, editors, technicians—create and aestheticize scientific imagery themselves. This ad hoc activity is rarely discussed, either within science or in mainstream culture, and it constitutes a rich arena for the shaping of meaning. Scientists choose to represent certain structures or concepts, many of them through photographic documentation, that are subsequently manipulated or enhanced. These manipulations are intended to highlight the represented results, not to mislead or create superficialities. In the process of prioritizing information, these images create an aesthetic within the technical domain of science.

The graphic-information theorist Edward Tufte started a quiet revolution when he self-published The Visual Display of Quantitative Data in 1983. His ideas about the visual display of quantitative data are underutilized among the arbiters of cultural discourse on science. But Squiers unwittingly picks up many of the threads in Tufte’s analyses by foregrounding science as a system of representation, with photography as one of its core imaging tools.

Support for such a sustained multi-component exhibition project is rare. The International Center for Photography deserves credit for providing the space and time for Squiers to conduct her work. Now that Squiers has delved a bit more deeply into the potent representational labyrinth of science, including scientists and artists alike, I hope other institutions and individual sponsors will keep the dialogue going—and for more than just the sake of exhibition culture.

Lynn Love covers the immunology and virology, mathematical biology, and clinical research beats as Science Writer at Rockefeller University’s Office of Communications. In addition, she is a member of the New York Consortium for Science and Society, and contributes articles about science and culture to a variety of publications.