Molecular biology and photography stimulate and activate different parts of the brain. For Schreyer Honors College alumnus Luke Brezovec, 2015, who majored in both disciplines at Penn State, that was the point.
“They’re each a break from the other,” Brezovec said. “When I had enough science, I would concentrate on photography.”
His pursuit of science has taken Brezovec all around the world to places that have been mining grounds for some breathtaking photos. He is currently working to fund his first photobook.
The book is titled “Ozymandias,” a nod to the Percy Bysshe Shelley sonnet about an Egyptian pharaoh and the impermanence of great empires. Brezovec’s photographs, many of old buildings, explore that theme and build on his first photo exhibition, “The Gilded and the Faded.”
“Because creation and destruction necessarily and unequivocally lead to the other, they shouldn’t be considered separate or isolated; they are a cycle, and two halves of the same whole,” Brezovec wrote. “Each contains the seed for the other.”
Brezovec took a pair of photography courses “for fun” at State College Area High School and won a local art award, but the seeds of his book were planted in Potsdam, Germany during the summer following his freshman year at Penn State. Brezovec was researching whether a certain type of molecule could be used to treat cancer as part of an exchange program at the University of Potsdam. In his spare time, he began taking pictures of abandoned train stations and factories.
Journeys to Belgium, Italy and Poland followed, and Brezovec began looking for more nearby travel and photo opportunities as his research took him to the University of Cambridge, through a Schreyer Honors College International Research Grant, in the fall of 2013.
He’s also been to the Netherlands, France, Spain, the Czech Republic, Greece, Ireland, Switzerland, Thailand, New Zealand, Australia and, most recently, Costa Rica.
“I was really interested in how, oh, here’s this palace hundreds of years ago that is now totally forgotten,” he said, “but in its day it would have been the center of culture.”
Brezovec had juxtaposed creation and destruction in his “The Gilded and Faded” exhibition, but “Ozymandias” is the result of him seeing those seemingly conflicting terms present in the same picture.
“As I kept travelling for other research, it wasn’t a simple separating the two – beautiful buildings versus something falling apart – because even the falling-apart ones were really beautiful in their own way,” he said.
His goal is to publish 750 hard-cover, 10 x 12-inch copies of the book, which will include more than 100 photographs. Part of his inspiration came from a trip back to one of his childhood homes, a house in the middle of the woods where his family lived when his father was a natural gas engineer. Even after the family had moved, they still kept a few things there in case his father needed to stay a night or two. When Brezovec returned eight years later to photograph the house, he saw his childhood toys still on the floor.
“I think these days that people are looking for photos a lot more online,” he said. “And I think that’s great – sharing art and photography. Everyone has a camera in their phone, everyone’s sort of doing their own form of photography. But I think that there’s something really different about the physical photographs, actually holding it in your hand.”
Brezovec, who graduated from Penn State in May 2015, will start work toward a doctorate in neuroscience at Stanford this fall. He hopes to become a professor of neuroscience and continue to explore how the brain works. Though his increased research load might put his photography on hold for a while, he has no intentions of letting dust form on his camera.
“It’s something that I love,” he said. “There’s no reason I would stop doing that.”