Milk Drop Coronet
Harold E. Edgerton
HAROLD E. EDGERTON, c.1936. GELATIN SILVER PRINT.
With new mediums come new realities. In the fledgling days of photography, Eadweard Muybridge photographed movement to show a hidden world, capturing for the first time with a camera that which the human eye could not see and freezing time into thousands of single moments that could be analysed, explored and understood. It would be another 50 years, with the electrical engineer Harold Edgerton, for the very fabric of our perception to be changed by the camera again. Edgerton built a device capable of shooting quickly, and at close range, with the shutter responding to the a disruption caused by the falling drip across a laser sight. It is, perfectly, at the intersection between art and science and the resulting photograph, though it exists in many guises over the 20 years Edgerton experimented, has become one of the most important and significant photographs ever taken. Edgerton did not consider himself an artist, and it is true that the process of creation was entirely mechanical, but he did set the scenes, and build the device that allowed the removal of his hand from the process. And yet in this way, he did so successfully what all artists strive to do: capture truth and show through creation a new perspective on the world around us.