A few of the key ideas represented in this reading are the concepts of visual culture, and the interdependency of science and culture. Visual culture is the facet of culture that deals with understanding of the world through images and other visuals. It encompasses many types of media, from painting, to photography, film, and advertising, to graphical representations of scientific data. Especially in today’s media-oriented society, we can accurately describe our culture as a visual culture. As our culture has shifted to more visual modes of conveying information, our knowledge and the knowledge we seek has experienced a similar shift towards visual understanding of the world. Further, the combination of this cultural shift with the advent of technology has resulted in a shift in the scale through which we understand the organization of life. Instruments such as scanning electron microscopes and gene sequencing machines have provided us with a very unique perspective on the structure of extremely small-scale systems – this technology has given us the ability to visualize life in a manner that is otherwise invisible; it allows us to see the unseen.

The modern technologies that allow us to “visualize the invisible” are consequently re-defining our cultural definition of truth. Previously, peoples’ ideas of truth were directed by senses other than just sight – “truth” was rooted in cultural mythologies, “gut feelings”, and tradition. While this predominantly visual era provides a fresh perspective on the parameters of defining truth, it also tends to challenge the validity of truth that derives from other, non-visual sources. An example explored in this reading is the ultrasound. Sonographic imagery has the power to uninvasively provide answers to medical questions, but in turn, labels our intuitions and gut reactions as inadequate.

Photography has played a very important role in our cultural understanding of art-science interdependency. Interestingly, photographs were originally regarded as a type of objective evidence (because cameras are mechanical tools), regardless of the subjectivity of the photographer. Photographs require the photographer to make culturally informed decisions about composition, context, etc., and thus are more subjective than many people like to accept. In this way, photography contributes to this new perspective of defining truth, and it possesses the power to make the unseen, visible. Scientific images, such as photographs, can effectively shape a culture’s mode of thinking, by acting as both informative and aesthetic. Imaging techniques such as the x-ray further promote the idea that images reveal truth beyond the ability of humans. These technologies successfully dissipated much of the mystery surrounding the structure of the internal human body, and similarly, are able to redefine our understanding of truth and reality.