Before iPhone: Photography by Paul Sokal

Award-winning photographer and physician, Dr. Paul Sokal MD, explores the rapid pace of technological change through large format color photographs of the relics of once-revolutionary products now replaced by cell phones. According to Sokal,

“As our world becomes increasingly complex and technology dependent, I am often drawn back to my mid-century childhood when the world at least seemed simpler. The small, everyday artifacts of that time have become talismans, able to conjure up memories like capturing images on film and later discovering the outcome in the darkroom.”

In this series, Sokal transforms early technological into icons of a bygone era by creating larger than life digital images of telephones, slide-rules, alarm clocks and other obsolete everyday objects. 

This exhibit is part of the ART + SCIENCE = WONDER exhibitions on view Summer 2018.

“After a certain high level of technical skill is achieved, science and art tend to coalesce in esthetics, plasticity, and form. The greatest scientists are artists as well.”   – Albert Einstein

Summer 2018 The Grace Museum presents a series of exhibitions and programs designed to explore the synergy between visual art, science, math, and technology.  Both science and art are human attempts to understand and describe the world around us. The subjects, materials, and methods have different traditions, but the motivations and goals are fundamentally the same.  One of the most primitive innate ‘needs’ of humans is to understand the world around us, and then share that understanding. Both artists and scientists strive to ‘see’ the world in new ways, and communicate that vision. When scientists and artists communicate their insights successfully, the rest of us suddenly ‘see’ the world differently.