Here’s a question good Doctor Edgerton raises in black and white and saturated colour: can you completely abstract a bullet? You can certainly make play with its trajectory, stopping it amid a billow of smoke, or tunnelling with disconcerting precision through an apple (pictured). You can create static beauty from velocity and show the eye something it was not built to see. In that sense Harold Edgerton, a pioneering American scientist and the inventor of a powerful strobe enabling nocturnal reconnaissance in WWII, is Pandora, letting secrets out into the light. But surely no man born in 1903 could reduce a ballistic missile to a series of studies in movement while ignoring its deadly implications?
Yet the significance is hard to see here. In fact, even the bullet-free images are oddly stripped of import. A fencer’s salute is an elegant exercise in multiple exposure, the slender blade flashing upwards as the luminous figure holding it stands, sword-straight, to attention. He is neither a sportsman nor a warrior but a play of light and shadow.
Edgerton was more rooted in facts than most photographers: he was an innovator in aerial and deep-sea photography who found new ways to map the air and the oceans. These images are close to perfect, but they don’t induce wonder, awe or fear – just scientific interest. And maybe that’s a flaw.
Nina Caplan