cover image Stopping Time: The Photographs of Harold Edgerton

Stopping Time: The Photographs of Harold Edgerton

Gus Hayafas. ABRAMS, $45 (167pp) ISBN 978-0-8109-1514-5

Inventor of the strobe flash and a pioneer of stop-action photography, Edgerton literally stops time in these remarkable photographs. A splashing milk drop, arrested with high-speed film and strobe, looks exactly like a king's crown. A golfer, shot at 100 flashes per second, swings his driver into an Archimedian spiral. Pictures of fencers, tennis players, rope-skippers and ping-pong enthusiasts, all caught in action sequences, call to mind futurist paintings with their frantic sequences of motion. Edgerton's inventions for underwater photography have yielded such marvels as his photo of the top of a lava mountain thousands of feet below the ocean's surface. His picture of Stonehenge, taken from a night-flying plane, brings the eerie stone slabs to life. An MIT scientist, Edgerton is a genuine artist who probes the laws of motion in a hitherto invisible world. (October)