Photo by Jacqueline Genovese
Medical students look at Robert Frank’s Car Accident — U.S. 66, Between Winslow and Flagstaff, Arizona at the Cantor Arts Center, with Sarah Naftalis (far right), a graduate student in art history.Honing the art of observation, and observing art
A new medical school course brings students to the Cantor Arts Center and Anderson Collection to practice close observation of art, and then learn how to translate those skills to a clinical setting.
The scene: A group of medical students huddled around the iconic Robert Frank photograph, Car Accident — U.S. 66, Between Winslow and Flagstaff, Arizona, at Stanford’s Cantor Center for the Visual Arts.
Sarah Naftalis, who’s studying for a PhD in art history at Stanford, led the students through an exercise: She asked them what they saw as she gestured to the photograph, which shows four people standing in a field and looking at blanket that presumably covers a corpse, or corpses, on the ground. Several students noted the people, the odd lumpiness of the blanket and the reduced horizon.
