About
Born in Lafayette, Indiana, E. Michael Van Buskirk received bachelor and master degrees from Harvard University and a Doctor of Medicine from Boston University. Dr. Van Buskirk retired from a distinguished academic career in ophthalmology with some 200 publications, including four books about glaucoma. He founded and edited the Journal of Glaucoma, now in its 33rd year of publication. Among Dr. Van Buskirk's numerous awards and honorary lectureships over five continents were the Fankhouser Medal from the University of Basel and Distinguished Alumnus from the Department of Ophthalmology, Harvard Medical School.
In the new millennium, Dr. Van Buskirk moved from the practice and teaching of medicine to more aesthetic endeavors of writing and photography. Years of historical research uncovered enough information for the two books regarding family and medical history, one, the story of the Van Buskirk’s generational migration from New Netherlands to the Pacific Northwest and, the second, the story of medical body snatching in 19th century America. In addition, he opened a photographic print studio where he handprinted work in Platinum/Palladium and, later, with photographic Image Transfer onto canvas and other substrates.
GALLERY OBSCURA:
An early chapter of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes likens Holmes’s mind to a box room filled with bins holding widely disparate tidbits of information, each meticulously stored for instant recall. Doyle’s neurological concepts may seem a bit inconsistent with contemporary neuroscience, but his metaphor for memory applies to Gallery Obscura, my own box room, also pigeon-holed with disparate passions of my long and varied life.
STATEMENT:
I received my first 35mm camera, an Argus A, from a kindly old doctor friend of my father, amused I think, by a young boy enchanted with cameras and picture taking. In my Hoosier basement, I built the first of many darkrooms, but it proved the most intensely used until I had completed a half century interim of academic medicine studying the eye and treating its disorders. Passion for the eye came naturally to a young photographer, just as inevitable as it became for a senior ophthalmologist to return to photography in later years. Both fields emphasize the highly visual, with crisp attention to fine technical and aesthetic detail. Similarly, an engaging variety of optics and devices entice both surgeon and artist.