Harold Edgerton

I am a Harold Edgerton fan, as I am a fan of many deconstructions of common conceptions of time.  It amazes me how an arrangement of silver specks fixed in two dimensions as an image on a sheet of paper can so powerfully inform and misinform us about qualities of all four dimensions (the four we are aware of, at least).  
This Edgerton photograph of a bouncing steel ball is old and imperfect.  Technological advances have since added, exponentially, miraculous qualities of verisimilitude to photographic images.  Yet, as we evermore perfectly photograph reality, by its own rules we create evermore perfect illusions, evermore removed from reality.  
If you held this print in your hands—sensed the ‘ahah!’ dance of steel and time simultaneously measured and on the lam—you might face a new dimension as you turned the print on its edge.  Illusion, reality: where did they go?  What qualities does this object now have that it did not have a moment ago?

Gavin W Sisk
July 23, 2013