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Christine Finn at the Guardian recently wrote a post about the genetic portraits offered by MoMA to anyone willing to shoulder the $550 fee and a quick cheek swab. It’s a cool concept–selling people portraits of themselves that can only be obtained through a lab.

While MoMA is the first place I know of where you can get these art-cum-science projects done of yourself, they’re hardly the first place to combine modern science with photographic portraiture to yield unusual results. My favorite example–and probably the most thorough exploration of the idea–is Gary Schneider’s Genetic Self Portrait, work that toured and was published in book form by Light Work in 1999. It’s a nice exploration of the arbitrary nature of the scale at which most of us encounter identity: the face, body, and macroscopic movement of another human being. Working with a lab, Schneider made photographs of his tumor suppressor gene, chromosomes, hair, retinas, teeth, and even (in a fun twist on child portraiture) one of his sperm. The resulting series is a neat summation of all the ways we might define and recognize the self, if only our education–or our evolutionary biology–had conditioned us in a different way.