The photographs shown here were taken over a period of fifty years by Harold Edgerton, the inventor of the electronic flash and many other devices for taking high-speed, precisely timed photographs. The electronic flash permitted, for the first time, photographic exposures as short as a millionth of a second. With the flash a camera could stop a bullet in flight or the movement of a hummingbird's wing. Another invention--the rapidly repeating flash of the strobe light--put multiple exposures on the same negative, breaking the continuous movement of a golf swing into more than thirty overlapping images.
Edgerton was both a serious scientific investigator and a great showman. His inventions aided the study of bird flight--and the fireballs of nuclear explosions. But they could also be used to show the spectacular forms that result from a drop of milk splashing on a hard surface, or a Russian acrobat turning a back somersault on stilts in Madison Square Garden. The pictures in this exhibition were the highlights from a display of photographic fireworks that Edgerton offered the public from the 1930s to the 1980s.