Photographer Michael Frank is an Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of these images. From the project ‘Form Follows Function / Anatomy Specimens’. To see Michael’s body of work, click on any photograph.

“Medical imaging and illustration provide such a rich visual rhetoric to help us understand health, life, and ultimately, death. Prior to the development of imaging and its surrounding technology, doctors had to diagnose patients without being able to look inside their bodies at all.”

(The Creative Review / The Health Issue April 2015)

Form Follows Function

The aim of this vast body of work is to show the beauty of the human and animal anatomy and to lift these specimens from dust cladded shelves to the public eye.

Royal Veterinary College

Image of an intact sheep heart showing the ligaments arteriosum and coronary circulation.

This image shows an injected bull penis showing venous drainage and the sigmoid flexure common in ruminants and pigs

Foetus and discoid placenta of a monkey
This image shows a fetus of a monkey enclosed in its fetus membranes. The discoid placenta, which supplies the fetus with nutrients, is attached behind it.

Pregnant uterus of a mare
The image shows a mare’s uterus with the fetus removed but still attached by the fetus membranes. The vast blood supply can be seen on the inner surface of the uterus

UCL Pathology Museum 2016

Charité Museum

Michael Frank is a commercial photographer with many years of studio and location experience in Milan, Italy. After years of freelance corporate, advertising and portrait work with national and international clients, Michael felt the need to implement and expand his photographic and personal horizons.

The move to London and subsequently the attending of various short courses on “Photography, Art and Architecture” at Central St. Martins under the fine lecturing of Diego Ferrari was only the prelude to further academic involvement. In 2011 Michael graduated from the MA course “Photography & Urban Cultures” at Goldsmiths University of London.

As part of Michael's successful dissertation, he started an ongoing visual investigation on the megalopolises’ most feared and cherished product, the crowd. The resulting body of work, stretching over 6 cities in different parts of the world, has been shortlisted for Leica Prize 2012 and exhibited at Les Rencontres d’Arles as well as in various Photo-festivals in Europe.

In 2014 Michael started to collaborate with the Royal Veterinary College London, the Royal College of Surgeons London, the Hunterian Museum, UCL and the Charité Museum Berlin where he photographed preserved anatomical specimen. The resulting body of work called Form Follows Function has been awarded with the Wellcome Image Award in 2015 as well as in 2016 and has been exhibited in museums and academic institutions worldwide.

More recent works are a retreating to Michaels professional roots, the still life. With an eye on old photography masters like Irving Penn, Edward Steichen or painters like Giorgio Morandi Michaels feel for rhythm, reduction, light, but also his intensive engagement with painterly tradition transforms what he sees into timeless compositions that sensitively and elegantly speak of the beauty of the things that surround us.

Michael currently lives in Berlin.