GALLERY


Harold E. Edgerton


”Don’t make me out to be an artist,” insisted Harold E. Edgerton. “I am an engineer. I am after the facts, only the facts.” But it’s fair to think of Edgerton not only as an artist—note how he used a cartridge as a mount in the image of the bullet piercing an apple at right— but also as one of history’s great explorers. The first to use the power of stroboscopic light to divide time into split-seconds and capture the result on film, he showed us a world we had never seen before, one filled with surprising symmetries and strange beauty. “In many ways, unexpected results are what have most inspired my photography,” he said. Born in Nebraska, Edgerton was influenced as a child by a shutterbug uncle, who helped him set up a darkroom. He received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technol- ogy, where he became a professor and began a life-long series of experiments in his lab, “Strobe Alley.” In World War II he worked with the U.S. military to develop aerial cameras that helped record the nocturnal movements of German troops before D-day. After the war, he returned to his role as explorer, teaming up with Jacques Cousteau to develop under- water cameras as well as sonar devices. The first photos taken of the Titanic on the seabed were made with a camera he developed.


Time flies—except here Edgerton, at top in 1967, was called “Doc” by generations of M.I.T. students before his death in 1990. At top right is “Coronet,” his 1957 image of the regal spatter created when a drop of milk hit a flat surface. Edgerton christened the 1964 image at bottom “How to Make Apple Sauce”


5


TOP LEFT: ALRED EISENSTAEDT—TIME LIFE PICTURES; TOP RIGHT AND BOT TOM: HAROLD E. EDGERTON—©HAROLD & ESTHER EDGERTON FOUNDATION, 2012, COURTESY OF PALM PRESS INC.


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8