Publisher's Synopsis
To consider beauty as a quality of truth has a very long history, especially within a scientific context. Antje Guenthers new project questions how aesthetic impulses, as well as the desire to prove, have been influencing the development of theories and hypotheses. Urban photographs of Barcelona, Glasgow and Osaka are combined with full-page reproductions of American photographer Wilson Alwyn Bentleys photomicrographs of snow crystals. Bentley produced over 5,000 photomicrographs, proving that no two crystals are exactly alike. Guenther closely analyzed Bentleys book Snow Crystals (1931), which supposedly contained 2,453 different crystals; in it she detected 76 exact crystals reproduced twice and two reproduced three times. In addition to her and Bentleys black-and-white photographs, Guenther includes text fragments on questions of beauty in science and the concept of supersymmetry. The book, created from her prior installation and projections, is built symmetrically, to visually seduce as well as to carefully compare images for potential evidence.
