Stories

Photographer Anand Varma found his place in civic science — and built a lab where kids learn to look closely

In 2017, freelance photographer Anand Varma started an ambitious independent project filming the jellyfish lifecycle in unprecedented detail. With the support of a National Geographic Media Innovation Fellowship, Varma intended to travel to get the footage he wanted. “I originally thought my project was going to be all over the world, scuba diving,” Varma says.

But he also planned to do some of the work from home, raising and photographing moon jellies. He hoped to capture some of their secrets on film, such as how they can reverse the aging process. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the photography laboratory he had built in his garage saved the entire project. Had he been trying to film from Japan or a distant aquarium, the project would have collapsed. Instead, he was home, in a four-bedroom house with five roommates, several of their partners who’d moved in for lockdown, and the jellyfish in his 300-square-foot garage.

Varma’s craft involves a lot more than shooting photos and film. He estimates his work is 65 percent engineering, 30 percent biology, and five percent photography. He builds custom incubators, rigs remote-controlled microscopes, and works through months of biological and technical problems to capture images or a few seconds of footage of phenomena no one has seen before. One of his photos of mind-controlling parasites, with lighting inspired by graphic novels, made the cover of National Geographic. A time-lapse he created of the 21-day honeybee lifecycle revealed behaviors bee researchers had never documented. He shot high-speed hummingbird footage at 3,000 frames per second that took more than a decade to produce.

Varma joined the inaugural cohort of Civic Science Fellows as an experienced science communicator with more than a decade of National Geographic stories, a TED talk with nearly 3 million views, and a World Press Photo first prize. Despite his impressive resume, he wasn’t sure he would fit in. “What I felt was that everybody else in the room was like a social scientist,” he says. Varma didn’t speak the same language. “I take pictures. I don’t write about them.”

His assumption had been that civic science was essentially science communication by another name and that they would be treading the familiar territory of helping scientists talk about their work more effectively. “We weren’t talking about that at all,” he says. “It was a lot more about how do we restructure power and access and resources within scientific institutions.”

The other fellows—many of whom had come through graduate programs and worked in academia—were debating systemic change from the inside. Varma felt the discussion was outside his area of expertise and decided to keep his focus on the jellyfish. “I’m not really sure how to restructure academia,” he says.

A chain reaction

Over time, Varma found his role in the cohort leading video workshops where he walked Fellows through his process and through his garage, showing what it looked like to sit with a creature for months and simply observe. As he was beginning to learn their language; they were borrowing his way of seeing.

What he took away from the Fellowship was a new, much broader conception of civic science. “The high-level definition I took away was: How can science serve people better?” he says. Science gets funded, directed, supported, and executed in ways that can all be harmful or fail to serve people. The civic science framework, as he came to understand it, “helps us think through how we hold every part of this ecosystem up to a standard that says, ‘Is this helping serve people better?’”

Within that framework, Varma found language for what he could contribute. He began to see his work as the first link in a chain, the generation of that spark of curiosity that can draw people in and eventually lead to empathy. “Attention precedes the curiosity. The curiosity precedes the knowledge. The knowledge precedes connection. Connection precedes care,” he says.

His work helps people to “hit pause on that filter” we all use to move through the world and start asking questions. “Am I still paying attention to the right things? Am I still ignoring the right things? Or am I accidentally ignoring something that’s really important?”

Varma’s work also created sparks within the Fellowship itself. For Christine Custis, a computer scientist and Civic Science Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, one of Varma’s parasite images—an amphipod helplessly drawn toward light—became a go-to metaphor for how technology platforms manipulate human behavior. It was the kind of bridge Varma hadn’t expected his photography could build: a nature image illustrating how an AI researcher thinks about her own field.

More recently, Varma published images of chicken embryo development in National Geographic that inspired biotech companies and university researchers to contact him, wanting to learn from what his close observation revealed. “We’ve been doing this since Aristotle,” Varma says. “You’d think we would have learned everything there is to learn by the intervening few thousand years.” But close attention keeps turning up surprises.

From a shed to WonderLab

The jellyfish project became his chance to observe the attention chain at work in a museum setting. “I knew I wanted to show the work to people in person,” Varma says. His Fellowship culminated in “Jellyfish Revealed,” an exhibit at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia in 2021. The show comprised 1,500 square feet of jellyfish video and images alongside live specimens and hands-on demonstrations.

From first concept to final exhibit, the jellyfish project had taken four years and two fellowships—a timeline that would have been impossible within a single grant cycle. After the show, Varma began to look for more ways to feed the attention chain. With magazine budgets and timelines shrinking, he wasn’t sure how to move forward. “How do I build on this? How do I grow further?”

Then came a conversation with Lou Muglia, president of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund and a contact Varma had made through the Civic Science Fellowship network. Muglia liked the jellyfish work and was open to considering supporting whatever Varma did next. They discussed two paths: another creature, or something bigger.

“I was honestly much more excited about just the next creature in the shed,” Varma says. But almost as soon as his phone call with Muglia ended, he noticed a book on his shelf about Charles and Ray Eames, the designers most people know for their furniture. From the book, Varma had learned that they’d also been designing aquariums, experimenting with new ways of projecting films, tinkering across disciplines from a workshop that funded itself through design. He thought he might try something similar, “creating an interdisciplinary space where I can push my ideas forward, and I could invite others to push their ideas with me or alongside me.”

Seed funding from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund followed by a five-year grant from the National Geographic Society allowed Varma to move out of the garage, rent a converted 1927 ketchup factory in Berkeley, California, hire a team, and create the WonderLab.

Today, the lab hosts Varma’s own projects alongside those of other scientist-artists, including a year-long artist-in-residence. School groups, from second graders to graduate students, visit regularly. They tour active projects and then get a couple of hours with macro camera kits to investigate an object of their own choosing, “to learn how to observe it the way that we observe our photography subjects,” Varma says. It’s the attention chain in action: kids with cameras, learning to look closely at something they’d normally walk past.

Varma’s National Geographic grant runs out in December. He has three staff, a mortgage, a new baby, and another on the way. It’s a trade-off he’s been navigating his entire career. “I got comfortable enough with the financial instability,” he says, “and too used to the creative freedom.”

Though he isn’t sure what the new year will bring, he knows he’s found his path, and he’s determined to find a way to stay on it. “WonderLab is what I want to do. Whoever decides to support it.”