matizing the shot.
Edgerton’s work has
been shown at MoMA
since the 1930s and is
included in most major
art museum collections
worldwide with hundreds of exhibitions.
He was uncomfortable
with the description as
artist, but strove for
clarity, a sense of wonder, and surprise, and
understood the formal
beauty that influenced
his editing and presentation.
Edgerton was a true
resource for all at MIT.
For decades his darkrooms, lab, and studios were available to
all who completed his
course and exhibited a
sense of responsibility. Many theses, crossdepartmental projects,
and impressive datenights saw fruition in
the Strobe Lab. There
were no face cards left
in the decks of cards
at the Lab; fruits, light
bulbs, and balloons
had a very short life,
and the lesson of how
much work it entailed
to design, test, redesign, set-up, and clean
up to discover a few
micro-seconds of clarity was as fundamental a life-lesson as any
undergrad or seasoned
PhD was to garner at
MIT. Until 1965, one
could even use the
high power rifle that
made this picture; at
that time a group of
students, attempting
to “applesauce” other
fruits, worked into the
midnight hours calibrating, dealing with
sensitive and unstable
sound triggers, setting
up the heavy stand for
the gun, finally fired
and realized they had
not properly lined up
the “bullet catcher”
– the .30 cal. projectile pierced 2 (empty)
10
classroom walls and
the use of more powerful guns was relegated to the “Destructive
Testing Chambers” at
MIT.
All of Edgerton lab
classes were based on
series of Experiences;
he never referred to
these situations as
experiments,
with
one right answer. The
results were there to
ponder, wonder about,
be frustrated by, even
to celebrate. Insights
gained by what actually occurs instead of
simple confirmation of
what is thought to be
known are fundamental to learning and discovery. It is no surprise
that Doc referred to his
exhibitions as “Seeing
the Unseen”.