About
"Poet's are never young, in one sense. Their delicate ear hears the far-off whispers of eternity, which coarser souls must travel towards for scores of years before their dull sense is touched by them. A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience." - Oliver Wendell Holmes [1809-1894], The Professor at the Breakfast Table, p.239
On November 11, 2011 photography graduate students from the Art Institue of Boston collaborated with the Center for the History of Medicine's Warren Museum to shoot preparations and artifacts from the museum's collection. The students used a variety of photographic techniques to capture the Warren Museum artifacts. These included a wet collodion process invented in 1851, just five years after the establishment of the Museum. The wet process required plates to be prepared just moments before the image was taken and then processed immediately. Students brought a wooden camera (with a lens manusfactured in 1858) and a portable darkroom — a wooden box with a drape– of the type that were used by Civil War-era photographers. The workshop was part of a new “Art + Science” collaboration developing between HMS Human Resources and the Center for the History of Medicine.
The workshop eventually led to a physical display of the student artists' photographs with their Warren Museum subjects in the Lucretia McClure Gallery at the Countway Library of Medicine entitled A Moment's Insight. The exhibit was first displayed in May and June of 2012 and returned to the Gallery in October and November 2011. This electronic version of A Moment's Insight is derived from these physical efforts.