Professor Charles Falco

OK, yesterday Richard gave you his version of events.  Today, it’s my turn.

Part I: Making the Connections

My Background

The year: 1960
The place: Ft. Dodge, Iowa
Richard started his story ten years ago in Madrid.  I’ll start mine fifty years ago in Ft. Dodge.

I’ve been keenly interested in images since early childhood, starting with an old Kodak box camera, and advancing to my first “serious” camera when I was twelve. This involvement with creating and manipulating images using various processes — photography, cyanotypes, silk screening, etc. — steadily expanded as I got older, to the point that by age 30 I owned at least 20 lenses ranging up to a 800 mm super-telephoto, as well as had designed and fabricated various pieces of specialized photographic equipment for my imaging experiments.

The infrared camera described in this blog is the most recent piece of fabricated/altered imaging equipment dating back to an enlarger I made in high school by modifying an old bellows camera.Although I got my Ph.D. in physics, and have worked in experimental physics my entire career (first at Argonne National Laboratory, and since 1982 as a professor of optical sciences and of physics at the University of Arizona), I also have had an interest in art that dates back to childhood.  By age 30 I had visited over 25 art museums in eight countries, always using any free time during travels to physics conferences to visit art museums.  And motorcycle museums.

Like my interest in photography, I have been a participant in art as well as an observer.  In the May 14, 2007 issue of The New Yorker Magazine, Peter Schjelhahl wrote “An efficient test on where you stand on contemporary art is whether you are persuaded, or persuadable, that Chris Burden is a good artist. I think he’s pretty great.”  Burden is perhaps best known for his November 1971 conceptual art piece ‘Shoot’, in which he had himself shot in the arm.  A month earlier, for his piece ’220′, he and three others spent the night on wooden ladders in a gallery filled with 12″ of water into which he had dropped a 220-Volt electrical line.  I was one of those three participants.

Jumping ahead a few decades, in 1997 I was asked to co-curate the Solomon R. Guggenheim’s The Art of the Motorcycle exhibition that opened in 1998, and which set an all-time attendance record for that museum.  I shared an award for this work from the U.S. Chapter of the Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art with the architect Frank Gehry, the then-director of the museum Thomas Krens, and my co-curator Ultan Guilfoyle.

Making a long story short, thanks to Ultan Guilfoyle, in 2000 I was introduced to David Hockney by Lawrence Weschler, who had written a story about him in the January 30 issue of The New Yorker Magazine.  This resulted in the most intense period of collaboration of my entire scientific career.  One consequence of our collaboration was that I was invited to the National Science Foundation in 2006 to give the Distinguished Lecture in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences.  Zina Deretsky attended that talk, resulting in her arranging for me to speak at the annual meeting of the Association of Medical Illustrators, resulting in me meeting Richard McCoy, resulting in this blog.

Artwork in the Infrared

In the spring of 2008 I realized that since modern digital cameras use silicon CMOS or CCD sensors, and since silicon is sensitive reasonably far into the infrared (to ~1100 nm, whereas the visible ends at ~750 nm), a suitably-modified camera might allow the capture of high resolution infrared photographs — “IR reflectograms” — of works of art.  The reason IR reflectograms are of interest for art is that many pigments are semi-transparent to infrared light, allowing such light to penetrate through these pigments to reveal features that are not apparent in the visible.  Such features can include defects in the canvas or board (Figure 1),

Figure 1

areas that have been repaired by overpainting (Figure 2),

Figure 2

or underdrawings made on the white gesso (Figure 3).

Figure 3

In addition to paintings, the camera provides useful information on 3-dimensional objects (Figure 4).

Figure 4

However, the IR sensitivity of the silicon sensor is only one factor in the operation of an imaging device, so the only way to know if such camera would actually provide useful information for works of art would be to modify one and characterize all of its relevant features.

I rationalized spending the money for this by telling myself that, even if it proved useless for extracting useful information from art, I still could use it for general infrared photography.  However, my understanding of the technologies involved gave me a great deal of confidence my money would be well spent. As a result, a technical description of this high resolution infrared imaging instrument just appeared as an invited paper in the July 2009 issue of the ‘Review of Scientific Instruments’.  You can download a copy of it from the link at the bottom of my art-optics web page.

Figure 5

I conducted the first tests of this modified camera in my own university’s art museum, and immediately discovered interesting new information in some of the IR reflectograms.  As an example, the lines in the underdrawing in Figure 5 that are revealed in the IR converge to a well-defined vanishing point, showing that this particular artist understood the laws of geometrical perspective that had only recently been articulated.  This is information that no one ever could have known before.

The Infrared of Indiana

Having determined that the modified camera was indeed capable of extracting useful new information from paintings, I took it with me to Indianapolis where I was to speak at the Association of Medical Illustrators.  Basically, the reason I brought it was to gain experience with it when “on the road,” vs. in the relatively controlled environment of a museum located only a few hundred yards from my office.  However, I didn’t know I would have the opportunity to test it at the Indianapolis Museum of Art against paintings recently studied with a special-purpose IR camera, so the introduction to Richard McCoy and David Miller made by Zina Deretsky was pure serendipity.

The results initially were disappointing to all of us when looking at the freshly-captured images on the camera’s LCD screen, but we were very pleasantly surprised when we pulled them into Photoshop(R) on one of the museum’s computers.  The reason for the difference in appearance is that the resolution of the LCD screen is ~10x lower than the resolution of the actual images.  As a result, even features that are quite apparent in the images captured by the camera usually are barely, if at all, visible on the LCD screen.

Since that first “in situ” test in Indianapolis in July 2008, I have captured IR reflectograms with this camera in eleven art museums on three continents so far.  One of my favorite incidents involving it was an evening talk I gave at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, in which I discussed some of features revealed in one of their paintings (a Pissarro) by an IR reflectogram.  I captured that image at 11:31 a.m. and talked about it at 7:20 p.m., which must be some new record for the fastest time between extracting new scientific data from an artwork and “publishing” the results.  You can see this talk on Youtube, and my 2 minute discussion of the IR starts at 50′ 40″ into the video.

I should note that nothing revealed by that IR reflectogram was particularly spectacular.  But, I already had data on another Pissarro painting in my talk, so this was a great opportunity to work in something previously unknown about a painting in that museum’s own collection.  I also gave the audience the homework assignment of remembering what I had just showed them, and after my talk going back to the actual painting to look for the features themselves.  So, in addition to extracting useful new data from paintings, this camera also can be used to engage an audience in art history in new ways.

Group IR Shot. David Miller, Charles Falco, Richard McCoy, Zina Deretsky, Aimee Allen, Christina Milton-O'Connell, and Linda Witkowski

Part I: Making the Connections

The year: 1998
The place: Madrid, Spain.

In Madrid I was learning encuadernación and life drawing when I met Zina Deretsky who at the time was illustrating many different species of Iberian lacewings at the same Universidad Complutense.  We became good friends and began trading stories on our walks to la Universidad.  My stories revolved around my upbringing in the agra-centric world of Indiana – topics included sports, people I knew in Future Farmers of America (FFA), unnecessarily large trucks owned by adolescent boys, and a now-defunct yearly event at my high school called “Farm Day.”  Farm Day was amazing, but I’m not going into that here.  Zina’s stories revolved around sunny California, Yale, and her quasi-scientific vodka sampling.  She went on to grad school at Johns Hopkins and later became an illustrator who works for the National Science Foundation.  And after grad school in New York, I went on to come back to Indiana as an art conservator for the IMA.

Antlion by Zina Deretsky

So, last summer I was more than happy to help Zina organize a workshop at the IMA for the American Medical Illustrators Annual Meeting.  And how did Zina get to Indy from her D.C. area home?  By motorcycle, of course

I quickly found out that one of the big highlights of the AMI Annual Meeting is the “Salon” where medical illustrators exhibit and celebrate their recent illustrations and projects.  After checking out some of gruesomely fascinating work (that one of the car accident for the court trial still troubles me) we bumped into University of Arizona PhD student, Aimee Allen, who had just finished teaching a workshop with Zina on drawing with camera obscuras. The cameras that they used for the workshop happened to be owned by Charles Falco  (who from here on, for sake of continuity and accuracy, will be referred to simply as “Falco”).

Falco was at the AMI Annual Meeting giving a couple of lectures including one on the “Use of Mirrors and Optics in Early Renaissance Painting.” Knowing a little about the Falco from his work on the Hockney-Falco thesis, and as the co-curator of “The Art of the Motorcycle” at the Guggenheim Museum, I really wanted to catch one of his lectures.  But I never could get away from the IMA to go hear him.

To make a long story short, Falco, Aimee, and Zina came by the conservation lab to have a look on the work currently being done on the renaissance-era painting by Sebestian Mainardi.   You may have seen this work in the Star Studio as part of the conservation exhibition.  If not, here’s an introductory video:

Note: as of last month you can now come and visit the painting installed in the Clowes Courtyard. (Yeah, it’s worth a special trip!)

I was surprised when Falco brought a modified digital SLR camera with him that allowed him to photograph the Infrared Region (IR) of the electromagnetic spectrum.  Conservators have been using IR cameras as an examination and documentation technique for decades, but usually the process requires a more complicated set up than the SLR camera Falco was carrying around.

You now might have realized that the first image in this post looks a little different.  It’s not that it’s black and white: it’s an IR image taken by Falco’s camera in front of the Mainardi.

For example, the IMA has owned an IR video camera in its lab for close to 30 years. Being able to see into the IR is particularly helpful when looking at paintings that have underdrawings – literally I mean drawings underneath the paint layers that artists would have used as guides while making paintings (if you want to see how a renaissance artist would have used an under drawing in a panel painting go here).   Simply stated, using an IR camera to look at a painting allows us to “see” behind certain paint layers.  This is quite helpful for conservators doing research into an artist’s techniques and materials and it can also guide conservators in their approach in the event an intervention is required.

Laurence Robinson of Opus Instruments Ltd demonstrating the Osiris IR camera at the IMA

Having Falco visit when he did was convenient because a few weeks prior we were visited by Laurence Robinson of Opus Instruments Ltd. who came to the IMA from the UK to demonstrate a new digital IRR camera system.  This “Osiris” camera is fabulous. It produces high-quality and high-resolution digital images using an array of sensors.  This camera has the capacity to see into a greater range of the IR spectrum than the camera that Falco brought with him.  Though this camera is rather portable, it’s not nearly as portable as Falco’s modified hand-held SLR camera.  Also it’s considerably more expensive and requires some expertise to use properly.

Obviously, we were all thrilled to escort Falco and the rest of the gang around the lab as they looked at and photographed some other paintings that we had recently examined using the Osiris camera.  Falco snapped away in the lab and up in the galleries.  We were impressed with the immediate results of his easy-to-use camera.

And it’s at this point in the story that I will stop.  You’ll have to come back tomorrow to read Falco’s side of the story.  I’ll give you a hint, though, he shows some great examples of what he’s been seeing with his camera for the past year, and also talks about an upcoming publication in the July 2009 issue of the ‘Review of Scientific Instruments’.