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| © Norm Barker / Johns Hopkins University |
| Araucaria Mirabilis is the scientific name of this pinecone from the Upper Jurassic period. The cone is over 75 million years old and has been so well preserved that the seed embryos can be clearly seen. Click photo for more images. |
The photographic community is incredibly diverse, made up of photographers that shoot from the sky to the sea and everywhere in between. Each month we'll focus on a different segment of the industry, interviewing top professional photographers about life, their careers, and what sets their piece of the photographic industry apart from the rest.
This month we focus on Norm Barker, a biomedical/scientific photographer at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Barker also serves on the faculty at Hopkins as director of the Pathology Photography Laboratory. Barker's work has been published in magazines, books, and exhibited around the world in museums and traveling exhibitions. His work emphasizes the incredible diversity of the photographic community; armed with a microscope and other, more conventional, photographic equipment, he brings us to a world not seen with the human eye.
When did you first begin to develop your identity as a photographer? Why did you decide to integrate photography as part of your career?
After I graduated from The Maryland Institute College of Art with a BFA in Photography, I wanted to go on to graduate school but had to pay the bills. I fell into a two-year paid training position at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine as a biomedical photographer. At the time I didn't even know what a biomedical photographer was, I wanted to be an artist. It didn't take long to figure that art was not going to pay the bills. This was around 1980 and one of the benefits of the job was that they paid for graduate school in the evening as long as you went to Johns Hopkins. I completed an MS in continuing education and was hired on staff.
What type of photography equipment do you use on a daily or weekly basis? How might this equipment differ from subject to subject?
Our department got into computer graphics and digital imaging very early, around 1982. It's incredible to see how much change has occurred in such a short amount of time. A majority of what we shot was on 4x5 or 5x7 film or Hasselblad for location. Being a large medical school we also shot literally millions of 35 mm copy slides for lectures; with PowerPoint, that's all gone.
Currently we are about 99% digital, but I still have some clients that request Kodachrome film for certain book projects. I don't mean to sound anti-technology but I really do miss the beautiful quality of a Kodachrome 25 slide. The problem with early digital systems was that we could not match the quality of film, but as you know, that's all changed too. All the scientific photography under the microscope in the operating rooms, the studio, location and public relations, is all-digital.
Being in the Pathology Department that services the entire medical school, I do a large amount of macro and photomicrography as well as very special lighting techniques such as darkfield and fluorescence. We use Nikon and Fuji cameras with a wide variety of lenses and specialized macro equipment. A large majority of what we do is published in textbooks or journals, so often times the image winds up being column width size, at most full cover size.
How much time do you spend behind a camera each week? What other responsibilities do you have as part of your job?
I'm sure photographers can relate when I say I would love to spend more time shooting than working on the computer, but that's not a reality. I'm usually shooting at my Zeiss microscope three to four hours a day and then fitting in whatever studio, or location assignment comes along that day. In the age of FedEx, faxes, and e-mail, clients are more demanding. Being from Johns Hopkins, one of the top medical Institutions in the world, I always stress quality. Our visuals are seen all over the world in print or at meetings. Our images have to be first rate, the best. I'm always fighting the "that's good enough" mentality that some of our busy clients have. As far as other responsibilities, I'm an Associate Professor with dual appointments in the departments of Pathology and Art as Applied to Medicine, so teaching and publishing my work is expected. I'm also Director of the Photography and Graphics Laboratory here at Johns Hopkins, so there are all the personnel and budgeting issues to deal with.
What type of subjects have you photographed over the years? Do you have any favorites?
I've been at Hopkins for 27 years and I can honestly say it's been a little of everything. The unusual thing about a biomedical/scientific photographer is that he or she needs to be expert with all the specialized techniques used for imaging science. But they also need to be highly proficient with all kinds of different areas of imaging such as portraiture, studio/location, public relations, architectural, just to mention a few. These are areas that we cover on any given day as our normal job responsibilities.
Obviously we get a fascinating behind the scenes look at the human body, which is an amazing machine, but we also enjoy being exposed to all different branches of knowledge in science. One day I might photograph the necropsy of an elephant, whose heart looked almost human but weighed in at 40 pounds, or I might be photographing rare 15th-century manuscripts. We just never know what assignment we might be asked to cover.
My personal favorite is photomicrography, photography under the microscope. The microscope provides a whole different beautiful world, that if done correctly can provide an interface between both science and art.
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