CAPTURING MOVEMENT IN TIME
THE ARTS START MOVING
Many artists throughout history have faced the challenge of depicting their subjects in motion. These endeavors reach back to the earliest attempts in painting and sculpture, some of them also ingeniously reflecting the phenomenon of time. Based on the attempts of the Cubists to give the viewer a time-space experience by showing different aspects of an object in one picture plane and relating it to the space around it, progressive painters like Giacomo Balla or Marcel Duchamp used the imagery of early photographic time-motion studies by Edweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey in their artistic visions of movement created in the 1910ies and 20ies. The manifoldly facetted female bodies in Balla's famous painting "Girl running on a Balcony (1912)" or Duchamp's "Nude descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912) simulate the structural mechanics of the human figure freely, thus documenting the strong interest of many artists in the findings of scientific research made possible by rapid technical developments in the fields of photography, cinematography and electronics of the 1920ies. It almost appears like a race between the arts and the sciences towards the best possible or most creative way of showing the fleeting beauty of the movements all around us we are mostly unconscious of.
THE SCIENCE OF SPEED
The inventor of the electronic flashlight as is it built into every modern camera today is Harald E. "Doc" Edgerton (1903-1990), who was a brilliant scientist, professor and committed teacher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from the late twenties until 1978. Throughout his career, he used strobe lights and stroboscopic devices for photographing phenomena of nature and fast or extremely fast moving objects never visible to the plain eye that way before. He earned himself the nickname "Papa Flash", a hallway of the MIT building No. 4 is called "Strobe Alley", accordingly to the long row of his historic achievements. It is where Edgerton did his research and taught the young to follow his path to understanding phenomena out of reach of the human senses. In 1949 the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City ennobled some of his striking high speed photographs, among them the iconic milk drop forming a characteristic "coronet" falling onto a saucer filled with milk, and early motion studies, by including them into the show "The Exact Instant". Curator Edward Steichen chose them for their quality as an example of the instantaneity of human vision, an idealized notion of modern art. By this decision Steichen also honored Edgerton's many predecessors, like the two French pioneers mentioned earlier or the English physics professor A. M. Worthington, who pushed frontiers in the experimental field of chronophotography in the late 19th century.
TECHNOLOGY MEETS ART AND PHOTOJOURNALISM
The difference between earlier attempts to capture motion and Edgerton's electronic approach is the "movement" of light which he formed into ultra short single or repeated stroboscopic impulses for exposing film and thus creating ultra sharp and detailed pictures. To call the public's attention to his technology when it reached the stage of applicability in the late 1930ies, Edgerton equipped chosen photographers with cameras combined with his flashes, so these artists and professionals were enabled to create pictures outside of the controlled environment of a laboratory and to promote the development of flash technology. One of the most enthusiastic and early adopters of the new technology was Gjon Mili, who started the first studio with electronic strobe lights ever in Montclair, New Jersey, in the mid thirties, then moved to New York in 1939 to be closer to the big publishing houses. His freeze frame and stroboscopic black-and-white pictures of famous actors, musicians, dancers and sports stars lit up in finely drawn contours against black studio backdrops where published extensively in the first year of Life magazine, launched 1936, which helped a lot to establish the reputation of both Gjon Mili and Life. Mili's multi-exposure recordings of performers in action differed greatly from the early experimental photographs taken by Edgerton, who claimed: "Don't make me out to be an artist. I am an engineer. I am after the facts. Only the facts." But almost all the results achieved by the use of Edgerton's advanced technology support his credo of the importance of developing the "ability to construct fruitful analogies between fields" as an important method of creative thinking and acting. So at a certain point the artists took over. Mili's works were sensible adaptions of the technical possibilities of his time: Art met high technology on the field of photography for the best of the development of the image, that men create to understand and explain the beauty and liveliness of the world to each other.
In 1936 "Doc" Edgerton explained that "there are great many different ways to use the method (stroboscopic light) and I feel that I have hardly learned how to use the tool yet." Many creative people learned to master it together with and after him and as his successors. Among them are, apart from pioneer Gjon Mili, professional and art photographers like Ben Rose (USA, 1916-1980) or Phillip Leonian (USA), who both specialized in the photographic description of movement in the 1960ies and 70ies. The School of Photographic Arts and Sciences of the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) keeps the flame of "Papa Flash" alive for the coming generations of inventors and artists alike.
Links to sites about Chrono- or High Speed Photography:
Chrono Photography About The Edgerton Center
About Gjon Mili
