Harold Edgerton (Paperback)

This title features images, in which an array of hydra-like tentacles surround a ragged white ring (the immediate aftermath of a drop of milk falling onto a table); and a sensuous red shape being stretched out at one end by a dense black spot (a bullet being shot through a candle flame). MIT scientist Harold Edgerton (1903-1990) devoted much of his career to revealing images like these - moments too brief for the human eye to ever glimpse in real time. As an inventor and electrical engineer, "Doc" Edgerton created and patented a series of high-speed electric flash mechanisms that enabled his cameras to capture the tiniest slices of time, and produced a substantial body of work almost as a by-product. The arresting images collected in this survey of his career occupy a fascinating mid-ground status between art and scientific artefact, and reveal Edgerton as a man magnificently obsessed with the paradoxes and wonders of motion.