Gus Solomons

Photograph

-

anonymous...

Name/Title

Gus Solomons

Entry/Object ID

2005.86.3

Photograph Details

Type of Photograph

Gelatin silver print

Category

American Art, 1945 to Today, Photographs

Acquisition

Accession

2005-281

Source or Donor

Brown Bag Contemporary (Steven Turner), Esther Graffin, George Batten, Theodore Tsang, Mark Friedman, Beverly Denenberg, Scott Shields, Joyce Cooper, Bobby Field, James Kidd, Dr. Louis Leiter, Brian Vail, Philip M. Laughlin, Lois Shelton, Ron Petersen, Mr. Raymond Gundlach, Michael Wolcott, Stuart Denenberg, George Tchobanoglous

Acquisition Method

Gift

Notes

Crocker Art Museum, gift of Rosemary and George Tchobanoglous

Made/Created

Artist

Harold Edgerton

Date made

1960

Time Period

20th Century

Place

Location

America, North America

Lexicon

Legacy Lexicon

Object Name

Web-Tag-People

Dimensions

Height

20-3/4 in

Width

17-1/2 in

Location

Category

Storage

Interpretative Labels

Label Type

Website Medium

Label

Gelatin silver print

General Notes

Note Type

Historical Note

Note

By the mid-20th century, photography had gained in popularity with American collectors and an ever-growing number of museums. New photographic technologies also meant that photography now played a larger role than ever in scientific inquiry. At the forefront of this exploration was a young graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). From 1926 until he perfected the stroboscope in 1931, Harold E. Edgerton experimented with combining the strobe flash and photography. Edgerton's development altered our understanding of time. Using the synchronized strobe allowed him to record objects in motion with exposures as brief as one fifty-thousandth to one-millionth of a second. While Eadweard Muybridge made groundbreaking motion studies in the 1880s, he, unlike Edgerton, required a battery of cameras and an intricate choreography of shutters to capture what Edgerton could now do in microseconds. As a member of MIT's faculty, Edgerton continued to make photogenic studies, often with dramatic flair as evidenced by his attraction to speeding bullets, falling milk droplets, and hummingbirds stilled in flight. Capturing what was outside the capacity of the human eye endlessly engaged him and surprised others. In 1960, Edgerton became interested in recording the human body in dance. For this, he recruited the young MIT student Gus Solomons as his subject. The dancer, later a noted performer, believed in the uniqueness of his own movement, which he felt Edgerton's studies would prove. The results of these sessions are among the most poetic Edgerton made. Here, the moving arms of the lithe and strong Solomons are recorded as wing-like trails.