The Imaging Man
Alexander Tsiaras wants his pictures to inspire better health
The body keeps no secrets from Alexander Tsiaras. His images reveal all: red cells deep within the lungs, jostling like a line of boisterous kindergarteners through a narrow capillary to hoist a load of oxygen. Delicate fronds of tissue tugging at the heart's valves. A globule of cells slowly assembling itself into a tadpole-ish creature that soon reveals human features and finally pops through the birth canal. But here, too, are a smoker's blasted lungs. Lumpy plaques in a coronary artery--a heart attack in the making. A blood vessel bursting in the brain: a stroke in progress.
Each of Tsiaras's visual explorations of the human body is an essay, always moving, occasionally disquieting. He displays them on Oprah, the Discovery Health Channel, in books and museum exhibits, on the Web--everywhere he can. His mission: "We want to change how people think about health, think about their bodies. The way to do that is by telling stories--beautiful, compelling, visual stories that show what an amazing thing the body is."
3-D in the flesh. Anatomical Travelogue, the company Tsiaras founded in 1996 to advance his goal, brings together more than 50 energetic programmers, biologists, researchers, and computer-trained medical illustrators (or, to use his term, "scientific visualization experts"). In a converted warehouse in Lower Manhattan, all massive steel beams and worn wood-plank flooring, Tsiaras's minions turn CT, MRI, and electron microscope scans of the body--flat black-and-white images--into living, moving, colorful 3-D flesh. Working from pure computer data, the zeros and ones produced by the scanning devices, they are far removed from conventional medical illustrators, who start with a bare canvas or screen.
Tsiaras was not always as driven as he is today at age 53. His formal education is sketchy--he favored sports and fun over study and attended five colleges without ever graduating ("I either got thrown out or left"). Instead, he learned photography fundamentals from a Time-Life book series, took pictures in Greece for a book on rural funeral traditions, and next studied with sculptor George Segal and photographer Lucas Samaras. Then came a day in the 1970s, says Tsiaras, when "I found myself with my brother, an ophthalmology resident, in the radiology lab, with all these strips of X-ray images from the 1930s hanging on the wall. The images were so beautiful; there was so much drama in them."
About 10 years later, Tsiaras saw CT and MRI scans for the first time. "It was one of those 'holy s---!' moments," he says." I was hooked, just blown away." Perhaps others couldn't teach him, but he could teach himself. He dived into books on math, optics, biology, and physics; learned two programming languages, and was on his way.
The 2-D scans Tsiaras uses as raw material--most obtained from universities, medical schools, the government, and manufacturers of imaging devices--are like ultrathin slices of the body and its parts. Stacking them creates 3-D images that capture an instant in time and can themselves be assembled into videolike animations of, for example, the heart valves hard at work.
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