Art & Exhibitions
At Sikkema Jenkins, Harold Edgerton Freezes the Past and Makes It Present
THE DAILY PIC: Strobe shots are fixed in history, but their tech seems eternally current.
Blake Gopnik
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THE DAILY PIC: This photograph by Harold Edgerton, the great scientist-photographer, is in a show of his work now at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. gallery in New York. Today’s strobe shot was taken eight decades ago, but as with most of Edgerton’s images, it still feels advanced and high-tech. Unlike his shots of bullet-blasted balloons or frozen milk splashes, however, this place-kicker photo has enough period color, in the details of its boot and football, to set it clearly in the past. While the photo freezes history for the microsecond that it takes for boot and ball to collide, it also builds a bridge between a past where people wore funny clothes and an eternal present of technological magic (© Estate of Harold Edgerton at MIT; courtesy of Palm Press, Inc.)
For a full survey of past Daily Pics visit blakegopnik.com/archive.
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