Moments of Vision: The Stroboscopic Revolution in Photography

Moments of Vision collects five decades of stop-motion photographs by Harold Edgerton. Edgerton was the MIT engineer whose stroboscopic flash let a camera freeze events too fast for the eye to register, from a bullet splitting an apple to a hummingbird's wingbeat.

MIT Press published the 177-page book in 1979 with text by James R. Killian Jr., the former MIT president who later served as the first presidential science advisor under Eisenhower. It gathers images Edgerton made while developing and testing his electronic flash equipment from the 1930s onward: milk drops caught mid-splash into a coronet, bullets frozen through cards and balloons, dancers and athletes stopped mid-motion. Many of the pictures began as engineering demonstrations rather than art. Their precision and abstraction made them fixtures of twentieth-century photography regardless of how they started.

Edgerton taught electrical engineering at MIT from 1934 until his death. His stroboscopic work carried well beyond the camera: he co-founded EG&G, which built the Rapatronic cameras used to photograph nuclear tests in the 1950s and 1960s, and he developed the side-scan sonar equipment he later used with Jacques Cousteau to search for shipwrecks, including the Britannic and the USS Monitor. Moments of Vision is the standard monograph for the photographic side of that career.