New technology brings many changes, both beneficial and harmful. Not least among the improvements is an ever-more-detailed look at the wonders formerly hidden from our limited animal senses. Magnification and photography permit us to look beyond our world and deep within ourselves. Every time we imagine that we have seen all there is to see, we are proven wrong yet again.
For proof, you can turn to a new book, The Architecture and Design of Man and Woman: The Marvel of the Human Body, Revealed, which consists of glorious images of the human body, inside and out, by renowned scientific photographer Alexander Tsiaras. The images, all full-page and full-color, are beautiful computer-modified hybrids of photography, scanning, X-ray photography, microphotography, molecular surveillance tools and Tsiaras’ own patented three-dimensional visualization software. Barry Werth’s accompanying text is literate and entertaining, not merely a workmanlike captioning of the images.
The cover shows a woman’s skeleton visible through her leaping, running body, and this single image demonstrates both the photographic method and the celebratory tone of the book. On these pages, we see inside capillaries and in between bone fibers. We look through the skin at the muscles and bones and nerves. Sometimes eerie, sometimes awe-inspiring, this is a book whose pages you will wear out with return visits.
