The publisher, ABCs, of Los Alamos, NM, has allowed the early release, for 2023, of an art book by a scientist. The book’s full title is Curious Visual Fun—Photo Arts from a Scientist. This 126–page book displays and discusses a substantive range of the composed photographic arts that accumulated across the lifespan of the author and photographer, Stephen Ledoux. Most of the included compositions, however, happened between the years 1975 and 2000, after which science writing took increasingly more of the author’s time and energy than did photography.

An early chapter, the introduction, summarizes the photography–related descriptions of life events and circumstances as originally presented in more detail in the author’s autobiography (Work Takes a Holiday—Confessions of a Natural Scientist of Behavior, which the publisher, ABCs, released in 2022 on www.lulu.com). Other “introduction” topics range from early photography developments, through balancing science and art, to various photo categories including many mentioned in the Table of Contents (e.g., window–frost photos, balloons, rare people portraits, plants, seasons, sunsets, structures, and even Amish quilts).

Importantly, the book early on includes a discussion of the definition of “art.” In this case the definition is enhanced by the author’s career as a Professor of Behaviorology, the natural science of human behavior, the discipline that studies why behaviors—like science and art—happen, a discipline that is not a part of, nor any kind of, psychology.

One such definition of art states that, scientifically, art is the novel products of, and the conditioned production of, responding induced by a wide range of environment–behavior contingencies (i.e., connections between “causal” environmental and genetic independent variables and the dependent variables of “effects” on behaviors) in an equally wide range of media, that may or may not produce reinforcing effects from its uses (i.e., its functions) but that indeed produce emotionally reinforcing effects, for others as well as the artist, that typically evoke the human verbal response of “beautiful.” The term “reinforcing effects,” in this context refers to effects that make the art–production responses and art–appreciation responses occur again later under similar evocative conditions.

Like the photos themselves, that definition is worth pondering.

The BOOKS page features a detailed description of the book along with the book’s covers, Table of Contents, and some introductory materials.