Milk Drop Coronet

Description

As a professor in Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dr. Harold Edgerton often claimed his photographic work was only an incidental result of scientific experimentation. Edgerton invented modern stroboscopic photography, which utilizes a rapid succession of light flashes in order to capture a quickly moving object. His graphic images—a bullet piercing a playing card, a football being kicked, a golfer's swing—gained popular acclaim as well, and were featured often in Life magazine throughout the 1940s. Edgerton began trying to photograph drops of milk in 1932, and in 1936 produced an image almost identical to the one here, but in black and white, of two milk drops colliding in a crown-like splash. He must have had an aesthetic as well as a scientific goal in mind, for he continued to experiment with this subject for two decades until he finally achieved visual clarity in vivid color.

Milk Drop Coronet

Harold Eugene Edgerton

1957

Accession Number

120885

Medium

Dye imbibition print

Dimensions

Image: 46.7 × 33.9 cm (18 7/16 × 13 3/8 in.); Paper: 50.7 × 40.4 cm (20 × 15 15/16 in.)

Classification

dye imbibition print

Museum

The Art Institute of Chicago

Chicago, United States

Credit Line

Gift of Boardroom, Inc.