Recently, the ex-practicing scientist Daniel Glaser of the Wellcome Trust, with mock-horror, used me as an example of the fact that no scientist leaving the lab was ‘safe’ from getting sucked back in. Even though I’ve been restored to scientific research for four months now, I am still quite regularly asked why I decided to return in the first place. It’s actually rather complicated even in my own head, and the answers often shift on a daily basis. But the truth is that my father, Dan Rohn, had a lot to do with it.
Journey into the unknown Detail from ‘Sentimental Journey’ by M. Daniel Rohn, taken on the Pelee Island Ferry, Lake Erie, 1953 (p.s. that’s my mother, Mary)
Dad, now retired in Colorado with Mom, is an emeritus art professor at Kent State University (whose academic reputation is still overshadowed by a sad incident involving four students gunned down by the Ohio National Guard in 1970). He started out as a painter and lithographer, including a stint earning his stripes as an assistant to Jasper Johns and bouncing ideas off his friend Roy Lichtenstein. Over the years, he’s worked with a variety of media and taught thousands of students, including most of the members of the New Wave band Devo (I can still remember the day he came home with the 45-inch single of ‘Whip It’). One of his paintings resides in the permanent collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art, and in later years he began to work with 8×10 platinum photography, an art form rendered obsolete by George Eastman’s discovery of the utility of silver halide for coating printing paper around the turn of the last century.
Despite the expense of its materials, platinum printing has since undergone a small revival, and I can testify to its unearthly beauty: though strictly black and white, the hand-coated platinum/palladium mixture still manages to impart a subtle warmth, and a seemingly infinite number of pixels. Dad became known in this niche field and has exhibited and won various awards for his beautiful landscapes. In fact, one of his images of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s snowy garden was featured on the cover of a prominent collection of the poet’s complete works.
But when Dad was younger, he had another active passion: singing. With a lot of hard work, he became an up-and-coming tenor in the prestigious Cleveland Orchestra Chorus. Although he has never talked too much about the tension between these two passions, it’s always been clear to me that the decision to settle on an art career was a painful one – and that, over the years of getting ground down by the many thankless and unremunerated aspects of teaching, it might have been one he had cause to regret.
Previously, I always felt fortunate never to have had this problem. With single-minded intensity of focus, I had wanted to go into biological research for as long as I could remember; in the seventh grade, I was even bestowed a cheap plastic medal inscribed with the words, ‘Most likely to become a scientist’. Nothing could deflect me from my path, I thought – until I got knocked off it in 2003 in the avalanche of a biotech bankruptcy. Four years into my new publishing career, the doubts had been steadily accumulating. But when I tried to look at the problem logically, head-on, all I could think about was twenty-something Dad, wavering on a pivotal point between art and music before taking his fateful fall into one side of an irrevocable life decision.
But that’s the thing I finally realized. Nothing is irrevocable. It doesn’t matter how old you are when you realize you’ve made a mistake – you can always start again. I guess my generation has been lucky in this regard; back in Dad’s day, you got a job and you plied it for life, for better or worse. It is only by a lucky accident of birth, being raised in an era and a society when all things are possible, that has allowed me this precious second chance to get back on the right road.
I had never even heard of platinum photography!! The photos are amazing – is the good resolution, because it is possible to “get” smaller particles on the film? What are the particles? I know that in “normal film” they are silver halides… (Hey that’s where they got the name AGFA from! Only clicked now!)
I sometimes wonder how my life would have gone if I had done music instead of science. I chose science, because I didn’t think I would make it as a concert pianist, but didn’t notice that I wasn’t the “best at science” either! If my aim had been the “lesser” option of performing in small ensembles, perhaps my choice would have been different….
The problem I have always lamented over is that there is no ‘control you’ to try out all these scary things for you. So my control adventures have to be sequentially in time, as opposed to simultaneously in space.
I don’t know if there are more pixels for sure, but it sure looks like it to me. You should see Dad’s photographs of running water – it’s unbelievable. You could swim in it. Unfortunately, I’m hazy on the chemistry, although I did once accidentally duplicate Eastman’s famous reaction when I was trying to do something else in a university chem lab, and ended up flunking the practical!
How platinum photography works (?):
The “film” contains ferric oxalate and tetrachloroplatinate (chloroplatinite). Ferric oxalate [iron (III)] is reduced to ferrous oxalate [iron (II)] by light. This makes a very faint postive image. You add the developer solution (potassium oxalate) and the ferrous oxalate reacts with the platinum (II) reducing it to platinum (0), which builds up the image.
Platinotype on Wikipedia
Early Photographic Processes
Eastman’s reaction? Yet another thing that I have not heard of!!
Maybe I should give my avatar in Second Life a chance to become a musician – I wonder if it is possible…
I think you should consider doing some music in your spare time In Real Life. Dabbling with things is a good way to know how you’d feel about it if the commitment were deeper. Although I do like the image of a Second Life band. Then there would need to be a Second Life version of MySpace…and so the paradoxes begin.
Your post reminds me of Ian Bostridge who like your dad sings tenor but unlike your dad chose music over academia.
I agree that the generation of our parents rarely deviated from their chosen field/path but my dad thinks it was actually easier to diverge back in his day because one did not require (m)any degrees/qualifications to do so. He started out as an electrical engineer and became a remisier (a stockbroking agent) when I was in my teens!
Another main difference in career prospects was the gender-related one. Back in the Fifties, my mother dropped out of art school when she married Dad, and never had a career afterwards. I often wonder what field she would have ended up in if she’d had to make these decisions thirty years later.