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# Berenice Abbot
- URL: https://www.jamesreeves.co/fields-and-waves/
- Published: 2022-09-05T16:43:05.000Z
- Updated: 2026-05-13T00:45:07.000Z
- Description: I've been stuck on the last 20% of a story I'm writing about a haunted frequency, so I went to the museum to shake some ideas loose.
- Author: James A. Reeves
- Tags: Art

As I wandered the Columbus Museum of Art, my brain was gunked up with doubt and bad adjectives. Then I ran into [Berenice Abbott’s](https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/mar/10/berenice-abbott-science-photography-trailblazer?ref=jamesreeves.co) portrait of a magnetic field. Its cosmic pattern reminded me of fireworks beneath the eyelids and my childhood conception of God, which came from the opening scenes of [*It’s a Wonderful Life*](http://jamesreeves.co/eve/?ref=jamesreeves.co). My thoughts turned to the moment dots become a recognizable pattern, the phenomena of stray bursts of electricity in our heads cohering into shapes, ideas, and loops that can seduce or horrify. 

Abbott pulled signals from the air and [made them visible](http://photomediationsmachine.net/2015/03/24/making-science-visible-the-photography-of-berenice-abbott/?ref=jamesreeves.co). Between 1958 and 1962, she documented magnetic fields and captured the interplay between prisms, water, and beams of light. She photographed wave patterns crashing into a piece of glass. “The artist through history has been the spokesman and conservator of human and spiritual energies and ideas,” Abbott [wrote in 1939](http://seeingscience.umbc.edu/2016/10/berenice-abbott-photography-and-science-1939/?ref=jamesreeves.co). “Today science needs its voice.”