Photographer Fritz Goro understood this sentiment well. His photographs highlight the beautiful, strange, amusing and poignant within the realm of scientific inquiry. Goro spent four decades as a photographer for LIFE magazine and Scientific American. The photos here are a selection of those featured at LIFE.com.
Goro was born in Bremen, Germany, and trained in the Bauhaus school of sculpture and design. He began a career in photojournalism, and by age 30 had become editor of the weekly Munich Illustrated. He left Germany with his wife in 1933 when Hitler came to power, came to the U.S. in 1936, and soon began freelancing for LIFE.
Scientific subjects were his passion, and according to LIFE he said he took photos of things that “more knowledgeable photographers might have considered unphotographable… I began to take pictures of things I barely understood, using techniques I’d never used before.”
Among his subjects were gestating fetuses, blood circulation in the heart, and the separation of plutonium and uranium isotopes to make the atomic bomb. His New York Times obituary hails him as the inventor of macrophotography, and quotes Gerard Piel, former science editor at LIFE, as saying, ”It was (Goro’s) artistry and ingenuity that made photographs of abstractions, of the big ideas from the genetic code to plate tectonics.” Goro also developed techniques for photographing bioluminescence, holograms and lasers.
Read more and see more pictures at Wired Science
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