Karsh I.
I went to Boston expressly to see the career retrospective of the work of Yousuf Karsh at the Museum of Fine Art and discovered upon my arrival that the Boston Public Library was doing a Karsh exhibit as well. Because the work raises several issues, I am discussing my observations in two entries on this blog.
The celebrity photographer.
There are two schools of thought regarding the interpretation of art works. The one holds that the observer should know as much about the artist as is possible and the interests that inform his work. The other simply states that an art work should stand on its own. In this exhibition at the Boston Public Library almost all of the photographs are accompanied by the notes that Karsh made and published with the photographs when they were featured in magazines and in other exhibitions. Thus we might infer that he was encouraging us to follow the first school and to understand him as well as the art works, but in doing so one can not escape the feeling that Karsh is attempting to place himself in the same category of celebrity as his subjects.
Yousuf Karsh was born in Armenia and left that country as a refugee with his parents and siblings, taking up residence in Syria. In his teen years an uncle in Canada sponsored him for immigration and so he went there and became the uncle’s apprentice in his studio photography business. Recognizing that young Karsh had a natural talent for the medium, he secured for him an apprenticeship with John Garo, the Boston photographer. Karsh spent three years in Boston. While there he availed himself of the opportunity to study and read at the Boston Public Library and he visited the MFA to study the history of western art. Late in life he retired to Boston. The photographs in both these exhibitions were gifts made by his wife, Estrelita Karsh, to these two institutions.
From this biographical material it can be understood that the young Karsh, speaking little or no English, learned to use his eyes, to see, when he worked with his uncle, and that with Garo, whose subjects were the socially prominent, he learned to interact with an elite group of socially and politically active persons. From both photographers Karsh learned to organize and run a photography studio. Because he was successful at all of these things it can be understood that he began with a sharp native intelligence, an attribute that might not have been encouraged in his home life as his parents were uneducated peasants.
On his return to Canada Karsh opened a studio in Ottawa and through the encouragement of a friend became involved with an amateur theatrical group, many of the members being local politicians. Eventually he came to the attention of the Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, who used Karsh to photograph important visitors, included in photographs that featured him as well, as a means to promote his tenure of office. It was through this connection, in 1942, that King arranged the sitting with Winston Churchill. That photograph, the definitive image of the World War II leader, thrust Karsh onto the international stage. It is an excellent photographs and it has tremendous presence. From that time forward his subjects were the makers and shapers of the modern world.
Through the notes, the notes and the photographs came to have equal importance: we have not only the presence of the subject but the presence of the photographer as well; Churchill is an important person and, through the anecdote, so is Karsh who made the photograph. While some self promotion is a vital necessity for any artist establishing his career, with Karsh one senses that self promotion had a far greater importance for him than it did for many other artists.
In recognizing the celebrity photographer, the photographer as celebrity, one has to draw a sharp distinction between the work as it is presented and the reputation that the work has achieved through the artist’s manipulation of the press and the public.
In the library exhibition all of the subjects are writers. Almost all of them are men. And all but four of them are wearing coats and ties. That particular form of dress removes these personalities to an earlier historic moment distant from our own. From his involvement with the theatrical group the observer can detect an influence in the dramatic lighting and in the staged mise en scene of many of these photographs. While dramatic lighting is an acceptable stylistic device, in too many of these, the mise en scene lapses into the clichéd. In the corner of what appears to be a library/study, we see a woman, Pearl Buck, sitting at a desk in profile to the camera. Behind her is a window with an open dictionary on a stand between the heavy draperies. Her desk top is cluttered with papers, a pot of pencils, and a desk calendar, suggesting a writer’s desk. In this photograph we are asked to believe that Miss Buck is deeply engaged with the work at hand. But if we step back from the photograph for a moment and study the lighting we have a different understanding.
Despite the opened window at the back with the view of an overcast gray day, which would indicate a diffused ambient lighting, a key light from the right sharply illuminates the face, a second light is at the back of her head, and a third light splays across the books in the bookcase behind her. The artificiality of the setting is augmented by the four light sources here. Thus we can see that this woman is not actually writing but that she is posing in a room that contains an 8 by 10 view camera, lighting equipment, and a photographer and his assistant. All of this intimacy and story telling is contrived.
Why was it contrived? Did Karsh find his subject so conventional as to be utterly boring? (Pearl Buck has the presence here of the president of a small town garden club.) Was it necessary to stage an event in order to salvage her public image as an important writer …or his as an important photographer of famous writers?
I think it can be understood that I consider this a bad photograph. And I was disappointed to find that many of the others were of this same school of thought. Others, Albert Camus, John Osborne, Norman Mailer, J.B. Priestley, are simply common photography studio portraits.
Some of them rise somewhat above that level. The Hemingway depicted is far more sweet, vulnerable, and human than his self projected image ever suggested. And the man, seen against a black ground, is the subject of a photograph that attempts to be nothing more than a photograph. It is a very good one: it has impact, composition, tonal values, texture, and the presence of an intriguing person. Conversely, the Francois Mauriac profile, also against black, a sliver of his head illuminated like a new moon, is a lovely strong image but I don’t know what that concept has to do with his contribution to letters. This could have been anyone with a hooked nose. His portrait of Cousteau, with an equally hooked nose, is a very, very similar photograph. The two photographs seen in the same exhibition diminish one another.
Some of the photographs are wonderful. The George Bernard Shaw portrait is exactly the public image that that man so carefully cultivated…he gave up not an inch of it! The Picasso is Picasso all the way. Both are wonderful photographs. (Did those two ever take a bad photograph?)
But when Karsh is really good, he is brilliant. In a portrait of two women one sits at the right in profile to the camera. Her hands are clasped and rest on a large book on the table before her. Her face conveys an inner peace, her benevolence and her willingness to experience whatever might befall her.
The other woman sits facing the camera but with her head tipped down as if straining to hear what is about to be said. Her right hand hovers above the clasped hands of the other woman. This woman too exudes peace and love but rather than a willingness to experience life her whole thrust is an intense desire to share and to communicate. Thus one is compelled to share and to give, one is compelled to experience and to accept. The dynamic between them is the essence of human interaction.
Against a black ground the two heads, one slightly above the other, are softly illuminated, gentle ovoid spheres. The hands at the left create an energetic but invisible diagonal from lower left to upper right. The bright edge of the book in the bottom left corner insists that it too has value to the composition; it too is a record of the human experience.
The two women could be any two women who have the ability to illustrate this moment. When these two are forgotten, this photograph will still retain its power.
The woman facing the camera is Polly Thompson and her companion, in profile, is Helen Keller.
I say when they are forgotten, because many of these subjects will be forgotten. Shortly after I entered the gallery a young couple, of college age if not college students, strode into the room. She went to the wall to read the introductory comments and he paced off around the room. Soon he shouted to her: “Hey. John F. Kennedy. He’s considered a writer because he wrote one book?” A few minutes later he laughed. “Wow. Winston Churchill. What the hell does he have to do with literature?” And as quickly he said: “This sucks. Let’s go.” She moved away from the comments and looked at a few of the photographs. She smiled. He kissed her and made much fuss over her. Arms wrapped about one another they breezed out to the room.
Oh, yes, considering the state of American education, these men and these few women will someday be forgotten. And I suspect that very few of these photographs and the anecdotes that accompany them will make an uneducated public curious to know who they were. These are rather dull men and women from another era in photographs presented in a style that is equally passé. As a person Yousuf Karsh was known to be charming, intelligent, ambitious, and completely professional in his working methods, but through his work we can see that he understood Art as something that was Deadly Serious. Despite their being portraits these photographs lack a human quality. He made some fine photographs, but I would say that overall these have historic rather than artistic value.
http://www.bpl.org/news/upcomingevents.htm#exhibits
Friday, October 17, 2008
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Karsh 100: A Biography in Images. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts
Karsh II.
At the entry to the Karsh exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts there is an eight by ten view camera on a tripod and on the wall beside it a photograph of Yousef Karsh holding an eight by ten negative to the light. The camera is one that Karsh used and so the museum visitor is given a graphic image of the size of the negatives and the camera lens used to make the many photographs in this career retrospective.
One of the most impressive attributes of the large format camera is its ability to render detail with great clarity. With a sharp focus, correct exposure, slow film with a fine grain, and good studio lighting, the resulting photographs will almost always have a very professional look to them regardless of the expertise of the photographer to capture the Character of his subjects.
Karsh certainly knew how to use the large format camera. He consistently released the shutter at exactly the right moment; with an eight by ten negative one does not run off 300 shots in fifteen minutes and hope for the best …one makes the photograph when he sees it. But in looking at these photographs, and I saw this exhibit on two separate occasions and twice on both visits, I am not at all convinced the he was a fine art photographer. He certainly was not a master of lighting. And I am not always convinced that he successfully depicted character rather than the subject’s well known public image.
The photograph of Albert Schweitzer with his head slightly lowered and his eyes cast down is a remarkable photograph of the hair on his head, in his moustache, and the lines and pores of his aging face. It is a graphic depiction of The Aged, but I don’t understand it as a portrait of Albert Schweitzer …I have read two of his books and his biography. As it regards Albert Schweitzer this photograph only tells me that he grew old.
In her biography, The Life of Yousef Karsh, Maria Tippett reports that Karsh was unhappy with his trip to Hollywood to photograph the stars because most of them, personalities manufactured through the studio system, never relinquished their manufactured images; Humphrey Bogart was always Humphrey Bogart in front of a camera, as was Elizabeth Taylor, Peter Lorre, and all of the others. Those photographs are included in this retrospective and we can see that Ms. Tippett was correct. Unfortunately the museum does not explain the photographer’s unhappiness with these photographs and so many visitors are likely to think that they are good photographs. They are not. They are run of the mill, the Hollywood mill, and Karsh knew that. It says something about the cultivation of his own celebrity status, however, that he continued to allow these to be publically exhibited.
Overall this all inclusive retrospective shows us that Karsh had access to all of the major personalities of the mid twentieth century from movie stars to statesmen, to scientists and writers, and Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Regardless of their work, each of them is a recognizable personality. With only a very few persons does he offer us something more than is usually shown.
In particular his photograph of the very young Fidel Castro is quite revealing. His face cropped close to the edges he stares directly at us. He burns with ambition, energy, ideas, and dreams. I have known this face through photographs for fifty years now. I lived in Miami the year he took over the Cuban government. And based on his public image and his coverage in the American press, I have never before sensed what a charismatic and inspiring personality he was…or as he is presented here. Which, I wonder, is the real man?
By contrast, that same winter I worked for over a month on a theatrical production written and directed by Tennessee Williams. I socialized with him on a number of occasions. I hardly recognized him from the photograph here taken only three years before I knew him. Karsh has placed him in a clichéd setting, the disheveled alcoholic author in a frenzy of work, manuscript, cigarette, and scotch and soda close at hand. Here he looks like a rabbit caught in the headlights. Even in his cups it was my experience that Tennessee Williams always comported himself like the southern gentleman that he was. He was always at a step removed from every situation, he was always the observer. I find the character of the man depicted in this photograph to be untrue.
In some of the earliest works we can see the photographs Karsh made working with an amateur theatrical group in Canada. Each of these photographs is staged but captures a moment of the drama. The influence of stage lighting and set design on his work is apparent. It can be seen that he used that sense of dramatic lighting in most of his portraits. But that does not always work for him. His lighting is often heavy handed. His works are not luminous; the light does not illuminate so much as it “hits” the subject. Often it disrupts the balance of values, as when the key is too high. And the lighting set up is too often merely routine …key, fill, background and always from the same angles in photograph after photograph. There is rarely a sense in his work that the subject and setting called for an individual resolution of the problems encountered, when it does, usually when there was no electrical outlet for his lights, it is available light and it seems it is always from the right.
Later in his career Karsh accepted some commissions to photograph various towns in Canada. I see nothing in these that I have not seen elsewhere. The photographs of his travels with Bishop Fulton J. Sheen are utterly mundane.
But I do see something I would not have expected to find in his photographs made in the factories for Ford of Canada. In both the photographs shown, Gow Crapper installing the back window of a car, and Terry Wasyke and Marris Lehoux in discussion with one holding the nozzle of a spray gun, there is a very high pitch of homoeroticism: Terry and Marris look as if they are about to get to it. Beyond that sudden sexual intrusion into his work, completely lacking in all of his other work including two female nudes, these photographs stand out because they are both so beside the point of the assignment.
As is the photograph in a paper factory in which one of the workers has climbed up onto the center of a huge, about forty by one hundred feet, roll of white paper in order to take his lunch, a la Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. The contrivance here is so obvious and the whole of it is so beside the point, I can’t imagine why it would have been made or why it continues to be shown.
Despite the fact that many of these are nice pictures, and a few of them perhaps great …Churchill, Picasso, Helen Keller, Shaw, Hemingway, and Pablo Casals, most of these are simply common .
As for seeing them, in this installation the MFA has made that almost impossible. Except for one color photograph all of these are black and white, many with black grounds. All have wide white mattes and black museum frames. The lighting is from high overhead and there is a high level of light in the gallery. As a result the glass over the photographs often acts as mirrors and so one sees himself looking at the photographs. I considered at one point making a photograph of this layered experience which would include the photographer, the subject, the photograph and the viewer. While the lighting at the library is not much better, there the photographs are illuminated with small fluorescent lights above each photograph, the library installation is by far the better of the two.
But the final insult in this gallery is a television interview with Karsh that runs over and over again as one moves about the room. In most museums these audio components have ear phones so that the visitors can proceed in silence. Going to the attendant to tell him how annoying I thought that was he stood up straight and stared at me “How do you think I feel: I have to stand here all day and listen to it!” Yes, the economy may have gone south but at least the Bush administration has been successful with their policy of a trickle down abrogation of personal responsibility.
The Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
http://www.mfa.org/master/sub.asp?key=1854&subkey=7143
At the entry to the Karsh exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts there is an eight by ten view camera on a tripod and on the wall beside it a photograph of Yousef Karsh holding an eight by ten negative to the light. The camera is one that Karsh used and so the museum visitor is given a graphic image of the size of the negatives and the camera lens used to make the many photographs in this career retrospective.
One of the most impressive attributes of the large format camera is its ability to render detail with great clarity. With a sharp focus, correct exposure, slow film with a fine grain, and good studio lighting, the resulting photographs will almost always have a very professional look to them regardless of the expertise of the photographer to capture the Character of his subjects.
Karsh certainly knew how to use the large format camera. He consistently released the shutter at exactly the right moment; with an eight by ten negative one does not run off 300 shots in fifteen minutes and hope for the best …one makes the photograph when he sees it. But in looking at these photographs, and I saw this exhibit on two separate occasions and twice on both visits, I am not at all convinced the he was a fine art photographer. He certainly was not a master of lighting. And I am not always convinced that he successfully depicted character rather than the subject’s well known public image.
The photograph of Albert Schweitzer with his head slightly lowered and his eyes cast down is a remarkable photograph of the hair on his head, in his moustache, and the lines and pores of his aging face. It is a graphic depiction of The Aged, but I don’t understand it as a portrait of Albert Schweitzer …I have read two of his books and his biography. As it regards Albert Schweitzer this photograph only tells me that he grew old.
In her biography, The Life of Yousef Karsh, Maria Tippett reports that Karsh was unhappy with his trip to Hollywood to photograph the stars because most of them, personalities manufactured through the studio system, never relinquished their manufactured images; Humphrey Bogart was always Humphrey Bogart in front of a camera, as was Elizabeth Taylor, Peter Lorre, and all of the others. Those photographs are included in this retrospective and we can see that Ms. Tippett was correct. Unfortunately the museum does not explain the photographer’s unhappiness with these photographs and so many visitors are likely to think that they are good photographs. They are not. They are run of the mill, the Hollywood mill, and Karsh knew that. It says something about the cultivation of his own celebrity status, however, that he continued to allow these to be publically exhibited.
Overall this all inclusive retrospective shows us that Karsh had access to all of the major personalities of the mid twentieth century from movie stars to statesmen, to scientists and writers, and Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Regardless of their work, each of them is a recognizable personality. With only a very few persons does he offer us something more than is usually shown.
In particular his photograph of the very young Fidel Castro is quite revealing. His face cropped close to the edges he stares directly at us. He burns with ambition, energy, ideas, and dreams. I have known this face through photographs for fifty years now. I lived in Miami the year he took over the Cuban government. And based on his public image and his coverage in the American press, I have never before sensed what a charismatic and inspiring personality he was…or as he is presented here. Which, I wonder, is the real man?
By contrast, that same winter I worked for over a month on a theatrical production written and directed by Tennessee Williams. I socialized with him on a number of occasions. I hardly recognized him from the photograph here taken only three years before I knew him. Karsh has placed him in a clichéd setting, the disheveled alcoholic author in a frenzy of work, manuscript, cigarette, and scotch and soda close at hand. Here he looks like a rabbit caught in the headlights. Even in his cups it was my experience that Tennessee Williams always comported himself like the southern gentleman that he was. He was always at a step removed from every situation, he was always the observer. I find the character of the man depicted in this photograph to be untrue.
In some of the earliest works we can see the photographs Karsh made working with an amateur theatrical group in Canada. Each of these photographs is staged but captures a moment of the drama. The influence of stage lighting and set design on his work is apparent. It can be seen that he used that sense of dramatic lighting in most of his portraits. But that does not always work for him. His lighting is often heavy handed. His works are not luminous; the light does not illuminate so much as it “hits” the subject. Often it disrupts the balance of values, as when the key is too high. And the lighting set up is too often merely routine …key, fill, background and always from the same angles in photograph after photograph. There is rarely a sense in his work that the subject and setting called for an individual resolution of the problems encountered, when it does, usually when there was no electrical outlet for his lights, it is available light and it seems it is always from the right.
Later in his career Karsh accepted some commissions to photograph various towns in Canada. I see nothing in these that I have not seen elsewhere. The photographs of his travels with Bishop Fulton J. Sheen are utterly mundane.
But I do see something I would not have expected to find in his photographs made in the factories for Ford of Canada. In both the photographs shown, Gow Crapper installing the back window of a car, and Terry Wasyke and Marris Lehoux in discussion with one holding the nozzle of a spray gun, there is a very high pitch of homoeroticism: Terry and Marris look as if they are about to get to it. Beyond that sudden sexual intrusion into his work, completely lacking in all of his other work including two female nudes, these photographs stand out because they are both so beside the point of the assignment.
As is the photograph in a paper factory in which one of the workers has climbed up onto the center of a huge, about forty by one hundred feet, roll of white paper in order to take his lunch, a la Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. The contrivance here is so obvious and the whole of it is so beside the point, I can’t imagine why it would have been made or why it continues to be shown.
Despite the fact that many of these are nice pictures, and a few of them perhaps great …Churchill, Picasso, Helen Keller, Shaw, Hemingway, and Pablo Casals, most of these are simply common .
As for seeing them, in this installation the MFA has made that almost impossible. Except for one color photograph all of these are black and white, many with black grounds. All have wide white mattes and black museum frames. The lighting is from high overhead and there is a high level of light in the gallery. As a result the glass over the photographs often acts as mirrors and so one sees himself looking at the photographs. I considered at one point making a photograph of this layered experience which would include the photographer, the subject, the photograph and the viewer. While the lighting at the library is not much better, there the photographs are illuminated with small fluorescent lights above each photograph, the library installation is by far the better of the two.
But the final insult in this gallery is a television interview with Karsh that runs over and over again as one moves about the room. In most museums these audio components have ear phones so that the visitors can proceed in silence. Going to the attendant to tell him how annoying I thought that was he stood up straight and stared at me “How do you think I feel: I have to stand here all day and listen to it!” Yes, the economy may have gone south but at least the Bush administration has been successful with their policy of a trickle down abrogation of personal responsibility.
The Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
http://www.mfa.org/master/sub.asp?key=1854&subkey=7143
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Flashes of Inspiration: The Work of Harold Edgerton //The Edgerton Center at MIT
Serendipity is a wonderful thing.
Laden with maps, a printed guide for a walking tour of the MIT campus, and with directions and brochures for five art galleries, as well as the MIT Museum, I set off on a picture perfect autumn day to study the architecture and art of this highly esteemed institution.
At the museum I discovered a very large exhibition of the work of Harold Edgerton and, at the end of the day, the last item on the printed walking tour directed me to the fourth floor of the main campus building to the Edgerton Center, a hallway with a permanent installation featuring photographs, equipment he had designed, and practical experiments set up to entice university students into this fascinating area of science.
While Harold Edgerton did not invent the strobe, which dates to 1832, he was the first to apply the idea of the strobe to photography, in order to study machinery in a working state, and in the process he invented the electronic flash and high speed photography, some of his exposures being 1/10,000th of a second. Most of us might not know his name but we do know his photography; the bullet stopped in the air after having blasted through an apple, a hummingbird in arrested flight, a man swinging a golf club, a foot on the moment of impact against a football, etc. He contributed significantly to underwater photography, earning the nickname from Jacques Cousteau, “Papa Flash”, he helped develop sonar imagining as well as night photography, which was used in World War II and which earned him a Medal of Freedom.
I can’t say that seeing the various pieces of equipment, most of which are sealed up containers, made much of an impression on me. But the photographs evoked the pleasure of running into old friends: we all know these photographs from Life and National Geographic magazines. These are photographs unlike any others and I was suddenly aware that they do present the effect that is so often claimed for art but rarely achieved and that is a new view of the commonplace in the world around us. They are fascinating because of what we are seeing… for the first time in a particular way. And in looking at them as art works with good composition, excellent black and white values, and with strong visual impact, it came to my awareness that these scientific exercises very successfully achieved the stature of fine art. As if to cap off that statement and that perception, each of them is an excellent print.
Having that feeling of an encounter with old friends in the Museum, in the hallway I realized that the rooms along the hallway were the actual laboratories where Edgerton and his colleagues worked. Looking into those rooms and seeing the work tables, work benches, and shelves lined with mechanical objects both finished and in parts, and his successors still at work, I felt “at the center of” and very much a part of the process. And I believe that is the intention of this hallway installation. Apparently these labs and these work rooms are open to any student wanting to explore an idea or to use the equipment to manifest a concept. With that realization there came to me a rush of exhilaration of the freedom of inquiry and the wholehearted support of others who have gone that way before. This was such a great distinction from what can be so often the sense of an intensely private place of jealously guarded secrets.
This sense of welcome collaboration and the sharing of intellectual experience so evident here greatly enhanced my understanding of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: there is no elitism at MIT: the doors are open to the curious student and the buildings are open to the interested visitor.
As it regards the fine arts and other museums, I was left to wonder why other institutions that are described as dedicated to the human experience very rarely evoke this same spontaneous and joyful sense of communion. My visit to these two galleries has altered my perception as to what contemporary art should be: it should be about the world in which we are participants and not about the private language of an art world that is distant, foreign, and closed to the rest of us.
Using this link you can get a glimpse of the hallway.
http://web.mit.edu/Edgerton/
The link to the MIT Museum exhibition:
http://web.mit.edu/museum/exhibitions/edgerton.html
Using this Wikipedia link you can find other examples of Edgerton’s photographs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Edgerton
Unfortunately none of these links include the photograph of Stonehenge silhouetted against the black night sky, its center illuminated by an electronic flash emitted from an airplane passing overhead. I can’t imagine how that was all coordinated. But it is a magnificent photograph. You’ll have to go to Boston to see it. The MIT Visitor’s Center is to the right of the entrance at 77 Massachusetts Avenue.
Laden with maps, a printed guide for a walking tour of the MIT campus, and with directions and brochures for five art galleries, as well as the MIT Museum, I set off on a picture perfect autumn day to study the architecture and art of this highly esteemed institution.
At the museum I discovered a very large exhibition of the work of Harold Edgerton and, at the end of the day, the last item on the printed walking tour directed me to the fourth floor of the main campus building to the Edgerton Center, a hallway with a permanent installation featuring photographs, equipment he had designed, and practical experiments set up to entice university students into this fascinating area of science.
While Harold Edgerton did not invent the strobe, which dates to 1832, he was the first to apply the idea of the strobe to photography, in order to study machinery in a working state, and in the process he invented the electronic flash and high speed photography, some of his exposures being 1/10,000th of a second. Most of us might not know his name but we do know his photography; the bullet stopped in the air after having blasted through an apple, a hummingbird in arrested flight, a man swinging a golf club, a foot on the moment of impact against a football, etc. He contributed significantly to underwater photography, earning the nickname from Jacques Cousteau, “Papa Flash”, he helped develop sonar imagining as well as night photography, which was used in World War II and which earned him a Medal of Freedom.
I can’t say that seeing the various pieces of equipment, most of which are sealed up containers, made much of an impression on me. But the photographs evoked the pleasure of running into old friends: we all know these photographs from Life and National Geographic magazines. These are photographs unlike any others and I was suddenly aware that they do present the effect that is so often claimed for art but rarely achieved and that is a new view of the commonplace in the world around us. They are fascinating because of what we are seeing… for the first time in a particular way. And in looking at them as art works with good composition, excellent black and white values, and with strong visual impact, it came to my awareness that these scientific exercises very successfully achieved the stature of fine art. As if to cap off that statement and that perception, each of them is an excellent print.
Having that feeling of an encounter with old friends in the Museum, in the hallway I realized that the rooms along the hallway were the actual laboratories where Edgerton and his colleagues worked. Looking into those rooms and seeing the work tables, work benches, and shelves lined with mechanical objects both finished and in parts, and his successors still at work, I felt “at the center of” and very much a part of the process. And I believe that is the intention of this hallway installation. Apparently these labs and these work rooms are open to any student wanting to explore an idea or to use the equipment to manifest a concept. With that realization there came to me a rush of exhilaration of the freedom of inquiry and the wholehearted support of others who have gone that way before. This was such a great distinction from what can be so often the sense of an intensely private place of jealously guarded secrets.
This sense of welcome collaboration and the sharing of intellectual experience so evident here greatly enhanced my understanding of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: there is no elitism at MIT: the doors are open to the curious student and the buildings are open to the interested visitor.
As it regards the fine arts and other museums, I was left to wonder why other institutions that are described as dedicated to the human experience very rarely evoke this same spontaneous and joyful sense of communion. My visit to these two galleries has altered my perception as to what contemporary art should be: it should be about the world in which we are participants and not about the private language of an art world that is distant, foreign, and closed to the rest of us.
Using this link you can get a glimpse of the hallway.
http://web.mit.edu/Edgerton/
The link to the MIT Museum exhibition:
http://web.mit.edu/museum/exhibitions/edgerton.html
Using this Wikipedia link you can find other examples of Edgerton’s photographs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Edgerton
Unfortunately none of these links include the photograph of Stonehenge silhouetted against the black night sky, its center illuminated by an electronic flash emitted from an airplane passing overhead. I can’t imagine how that was all coordinated. But it is a magnificent photograph. You’ll have to go to Boston to see it. The MIT Visitor’s Center is to the right of the entrance at 77 Massachusetts Avenue.
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