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.