I photographed Steven Pinker in October 2023, in his spacious office at Harvard’s William James Hall. Big tinted windows looked down on Cambridge and the campus. The light coming through them was extraordinary, luminous. Books, papers, and artifacts filled the room.
Pinker is a photographer himself and uses a Leica. We had that in common. At one point, he lifted a human brain in a jar with an almost theatrical flourish.
Much of his scientific work concerns abilities we rarely stop to consider. A child hears people speaking and gradually learns to speak. Before long, that child can describe something that has never happened or ask a question no one has asked before. How does this happen? Remembering what other people have said could only take the child so far.
Pinker and his colleagues have studied how people apply familiar patterns of language to unfamiliar words. In the account he developed in Words and Rules, memory stores words and their particular forms, while grammatical rules help us produce new forms. Researchers can test this by introducing an invented word and watching how people use it, looking at their mistakes as well as their successes.
The larger question is how we use limited experience to do something new. Language makes that question accessible because we all have experience of it. We misunderstand a sentence or struggle to find a word we know perfectly well. What feels like a passing difficulty can offer a psychologist evidence about how the mind works.
Pinker’s later books ask us to reconsider other familiar mental habits, including our conviction that the world is getting worse. In The Better Angels of Our Nature, he argues that many forms of violence have declined over long stretches of history. In Enlightenment Now, he examines improvements in human welfare, including longer lives and greater prosperity, and argues that reason and science have helped make them possible.
Such arguments depend on what we measure and the span of history we examine. A catastrophe reaches us immediately. An improvement that takes place over generations may pass almost unnoticed.
His interest is in how those improvements happened, and how people might continue them. That is a considerable distance to travel from the workings of language. Both subjects require him to question things that can seem obvious until someone asks for an explanation.
Back in William James Hall, he held the brain for my camera. For someone whose working life is spent with ideas, it was a wonderfully physical thing to do. I had come to photograph Steven Pinker. He had brought another brain into the picture.
