This photograph, taken by Michael Frank, is of a 40-year-old specimen from the
Lanyon Anatomy Museum of the Royal Veterinary College has just been selected as Image of the Year 2015 by the Wellcome Trust. The photograph is part of a project between Michael and Nick Short, Head of the eMedia Unit at the RVC, to bring new perspectives to a selection of specimens at the Lanyon Anatomy Museum. The specimen, a preserved uterus of a pony, approximately five months into pregnancy with the foetus still attached, has been preserved in formalin and was photographed through its Perspex container.
The RVC is honoured to have won this prestigious award especially in the
light of such stunning competition. We hope that through our photographic
techniques, we have managed to capture the magic of these old anatomy specimens
in a new digital format. Our passion has been to bring these specimens
back to life and create a unique resource which will be available for students
of anatomy to study and appreciate for many generations to come.
Michael Frank commented “I am delighted that this image has been chosen as the 2015
Wellcome Image Awards overall winner. This project has involved
many hours working with Nick Short at the RVC. Our vision was to capture these
incredible specimens which have sat for many years on the shelves of the Lanyon
Anatomy Museum. Using sophisticated photographic techniques, we were able to
rejuvenate these special dissections and make them available to a whole new
audience of students, academics and the public. I like to think that this
digital format is a fitting tribute to all the skill of past generations of
anatomists in creating these resources and the many generations of vets who
have benefited from studying them.
In
addition to the winning image, another image from the collaboration between
Michael and Nick was also shortlisted, the reticulum (stomach chamber) of a
goat. The RVC completed a hat-trick of shortlisted entries, with PhD student
Sophie Regnault’s 3D image of a preserved lizard specimen also making the final
twenty. These successes are reflective of the larger initiative led by the eMedia team at the RVC to bring anatomy
online. Full details of their work can be found on their website.
Picture
Editor of BBC Focus magazine, James Cutmore, who was a member of the judging
panel, said: “As far as standout images go, the image of the horse’s uterus
with the foetus still inside was incredible and just sticks in my mind. It
evokes many different emotions at once. It’s fascinating, sad, macabre, almost
brutal. Yet the subject is also delicate, detailed and beautiful. The image
shows us a large and magnificent creature reduced to this sad, fragile and
half-formed creation, which I find very humbling.”
Another judge, Tim Smit, Founding Director of the Eden Project described the winning image as “hypnotic, like a Hieronymus Bosch painting…only it is real and truly marvellous.”
Another judge, Tim Smit, Founding Director of the Eden Project described the winning image as “hypnotic, like a Hieronymus Bosch painting…only it is real and truly marvellous.”
From March 19th 2015 all the winning images will be exhibited at eleven science centres, museums and galleries, from the Eden Project in Cornwall to Satrosphere in Aberdeen, and as far afield as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Koch Institute), USA, will display the images in their own styles to spark imaginations everywhere.
The images will also be displayed in the window of the Wellcome Trust headquarters in London, and will be made available on the Wellcome Image Awards website. They already feature in Wellcome Images collections, where they can be accessed and used along with more than 40,000 other contemporary biomedical and clinical images. The Awards were established in 1997 to reward contributors to the collection for their outstanding work.
The following venues will be exhibiting the 2015 Wellcome Image Award winners:
·
At-Bristol
·
Cambridge
Science Centre
·
Dundee
Science Centre
·
Glasgow
Science Centre
·
Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (Koch Institute), USA
·
Museum
of Science and Industry (MOSI),
Manchester
·
Satrosphere,
Aberdeen
·
Techniquest,
Cardiff
·
The
Eden Project, Cornwall
·
The
University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, USA
·
W5,
Belfast
