Rotman

December 2016 | Issue 13

December 2016 | Issue 13

Taryn Simon Where she’s been, where she is, and where she’s going.

Harold “Doc” Edgerton How this MIT Professor inadvertently became a photograpic pioneer.

Susan Sontag

A look into her photographic philosophy.

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Rotman brings you the latest news, techniques, and trends within the photographic community.

Through analysis of both the past and the future, Rotman is the #1 choice of monthly literature for dedicated photographers.

In Plato’s Cave Excerpt by Susan Sontag

Taryn Simon Interview by Peter B. Parker

The Doctor Is In Interview by Tom Kray

Rotman | Photographic Expertise

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December 2016 | Issue 13

An excerpt from

In Plato’s Cave

By Susan Sontag

Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads -- as an anthology of images.

To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. In Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the King’s Army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasures from around the globe. Godard’s gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image., Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge -- and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.

Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them.

For many decades the book has been the most influential way of arranging (and usually miniaturizing) photographs, thereby guaranteeing them longevity, if not immortality -- photographs are fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid -- and a wider public. The photograph in a book is, obviously, the image of an image. But since it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth object, a photograph loses much less of its essential quality when reproduced in a book than a painting does. Still, the book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme for putting groups of photographs into general circulation. The sequence in which the photographs are to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amount of time to be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker’s film, Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated meditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and more rigorous way of packaging (and enlarging) still photographs. Both the order and the exact time for looking at each photograph are imposed; and there is a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. But photographs transcribed in a film cease to be collectable objects, as they still are when served up in books.

Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations. In another version of its utility, the camera record justifies. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture. Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph -- any photograph -- seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects. Virtuosi of the noble image like

Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, composing mighty, unforgettable photographs decade after decade, still want, first of all, to show something “out there,” just like the Polaroid owner for whom photographs are a handy, fast form of note-taking, or the shutterbug with a Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenirs of daily life.

While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film -- the precise expression on the subject’s face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity -- and ubiquity -- of the photographic record is photography’s “message,” its aggression.

Images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort, and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. This is as evident in the 1840s and 1850s, photography’s glorious first two decades, as in all the succeeding decades, during which technology made possible an ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs. Even for such early masters as David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron who used the camera as a means of getting painterly images, the point of taking photographs was a vast departure from the aims of painters. From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images.

That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption -- the toy of the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed -- seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures. The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s, had only inventors and buffs to operate them. Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.

A chimp reaches out to Jane Goodall, Nick Nichols

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SO HELP ME GOD Peter B. Parker

Like an Annie Leibovitz of the conceptual world, Simon seems to possess considerable clout when it comes to both access and control. Her mixture of tenacity and charm seems to have worked wonders on organisations not known for their openness: the Church of Scientology, the Ku Klux Klan and the Prisoner of War Interrogation Resistance Programme run by Team Delta, a private body run by former US military personnel. (Ironically, one of the few organisations that denied her access was Disney, whose spokesperson sent her a fax that read: “Especially during these violent times, I personally believe that the magical spell cast on guests that visit our theme parks is particularly important to protect, and helps to provide them with an important fantasy they can escape to.” It was, she told Interview Magazine, “better that any photograph I could have ever produced”.)

December 2016 | Issue 13

and Immigration granting a visa,” she explained. In person, Taryn Simon seems like an unlikely contender for the title of most important photographer of her generation. Dressed in brown woolly tights and a matching check dress that looks thrift shop but is probably designerAmish, she appears to have stepped out of a Sofia Coppola adaptation of an Edith Wharton novel.

She is charming and personable but becomes palpably nervous when talking about her work, which is characterised by its complexity and ambition. “I do seem to try to make things harder and harder for myself,” she says, laughing. “In some perverse way, obstacles interest me and I’m drawn to projects that end up being incredibly laborious.”

This week, an exhibition of new work entitled A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters opens at Tate Modern, a rare accolade for a photographer who is just 36 years old. It is an investigation into the nature of genealogy and its consequences and is her most complex, ambitious and laborious project yet. It comprises a series of 18 family bloodlines, each with a strange or arresting individual story at its heart: an Iraqi man who was apparently employed as Saddam Hussein’s son’s body double; a member of the Druze religious sect in Lebanon who believes in reincarnation and re-enacts remembered scenes from previous lives; a living Indian man who gives the project its title, having been declared dead in official records.

“It is a complex and multilayered exhibition, but also direct and engaging,” says Simon Baker, Tate Modern’s curator of photography.

“There are a small number of photographers who combine the visual and the textual so powerfully...”

“An Occupation of Loss” is the first performance piece by the artist Taryn Simon, who usually works with photography and text. In the installation, which Simon designed in collaboration with the architect Shohei Shigematsu at the Office of Metropolitan Architecture, professional mourners from fifteen countries sit in a half circle of eleven concrete towers at the Park Avenue Armory. The towers recall the pipes of an organ, Zoroastrian excarnation structures, and the architecture of surveillance.

During half-hour performances, visitors enter the towers, activating the dirges, songs, and weeping of the professionals within.

On a Friday night in September, a few days before the performance opened to the public, a somewhat exhausted Simon met with me for an interview in a windowless room in the Armory. Since 2007, she had collaborated with linguists, musicologists, anthropologists, and field workers, hiring the mourners and arranging their travel over Skype with the assistance of translators and fixers. The “occupation” of the show’s title evokes invasion and displacement and also the idea of mourning as a job. What drew Simon to the hired mourners, she said, “was this idea of mourning in an everlasting form and then the professionalization of it, and then thinking about the links between commerce and that sacred space of loss.”

Like nearly all of Simon’s body of work, the performance is an artistic consideration of state power. In “Contraband” (2010), she photographed a week’s worth of prohibited items seized from passengers and the mail in customs at John F. Kennedy International Airport.

In “Paperwork and the Will of Capital” (2015), she re-created the floral centerpieces from the signing ceremonies of thirty-six global treaties of the post-Bretton Woods era.

“An Occupation of Loss” similarly draws on themes of government bureaucracy and social realism. Bringing thirty people from fifteen different countries to New York City demanded an engagement with paperwork daunting even to Simon. Each mourner who performs in “An Occupation of Loss” was granted a P-3 visa, a category for “an artist or entertainer coming to be a part of a culturally unique program.”

The establishment of “cultural uniqueness” depends on “affidavits, testimonials, or letters from recognized experts”—mostly descriptions by anthropologists of the different traditions of mourning. The resulting stack of paper, Simon told me, was more than a foot high. The documentation of the visa process serves as a shadow accompaniment to the show, both a reminder of the administration that often accompanies death and, Simon said, of “authority and how it’s established and the systems that we create and also adhere to, to organize ourselves.”

“The installation is in many ways curated by the U.S. government, because the determinations of who is and isn’t here were subject to U.S. Customs

Simon is currently one of the hottest properties on the international art photography market. Her prints fetch stellar prices at auction and have been acquired by leading institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney in New York, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Pompidou Centre in Paris, as well as the Victoria and Albert Museum and Tate Modern in London. She is represented by Larry Gagosian, the gallery owner and art dealer who also represents Damien Hirst in New York and oversees the estate of Andy Warhol. A Living Man Declared Dead is on loan to Tate Modern from Jane and Michael Wilson, a couple who are perhaps the most important collectors of photography in Britain. (Michael Wilson, who made his fortune co-producing James Bond films with his sister, Barbara Broccoli, was recently described in the FT as “a one-man Photography Council”.)

Socially, too, Simon is well connected. She lives in downtown Manhattan with her husband, Jake Paltrow, a film-maker who recently directed his older sister, Gwyneth, in his debut feature, The Good Night.

In an article about their purchase of a $2m apartment in the Village, the New York Observer dubbed them “a dandy 30-ish power couple”. When I mentioned her to a New York-based photographer last week, he said, with a perhaps understandable mixture of bemusement and envy, “How many photographers have Steven Spielberg come to an opening?”

For all that, Simon is undoubtedly a serious and committed artist whose work is unapologetically cerebral. She is meticulous, perhaps even obsessive, in her preparation and research. A Living Man Declared Dead took four years to come to fruition, but only about two months of that

“An Occupation of Loss,” Taryn Simon’s performance piece at the Park Avenue Armory, draws on themes of government bureaucracy and social realism.

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Rotman | Photographic Expertise

Skywalker Ranch, Marin County, California time was spent photographing the subjects. es and vampires do, but to pose proudly for her invading lens…”

“The majority of my work is about preparation,” she says during a break

Simon grew up in New York and started taking pictures as a child. “Both from overseeing the installation of her show at Tate Modern. “The act of taking photo- my father and grandfather were avid photographers. I was introduced to the larger graphs is actually a very small part of the process. I work with a small team, just my world and photographic production through their slideshows. I would often go on little sister (Shannon Simon) and one assistant (Douglas Emery). We deal with translators, expeditions with them, taking photographs in a very loose form.” fixers, fact checkers and the logistics of setting up shoots in places where people do

Her father worked for the government, often travelling “to dangerous and not have the internet or access to telephones. Then there was the actual bloodlines distant places and returning with an enormous number of photographs”. Her grandwhich had to be constructed and verified.” She sighs and shakes her head. “It is easily father lived in Connecticut, where he ground glass for telescopes and, as she put it, the most difficult and demanding project I have done thus far.” “was more interested in the macro – stars, insects, and plant and animal life”. He also built telescopes, which may help explain the scientific undertow in her current work: the interest in genetic mapping and patterning, the portraits that are presented in “The majority of my work is about preperation.” systematic grids, complete with footnotes and ancillary information.

Photography, then, is in her blood, though she studied environmental sci She made her name with An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, ence at college, obtaining a BA at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. “I published in 2007, a book that delves deep into a secret America in images that are ofjust kept on taking photographs throughout my time there, and afterwards I worked ten both detached and ominous: a nuclear waste storage facility in Washington State; as an assistant for photographers involved in various approaches – anything from a a cryopreservation unit where bodies are frozen just after death; a bio-containment journalist to a toy catalogue photographer. Anything, really, just to learn about lighting laboratory where deadly animal diseases are studied; a death row outdoor recreationand composition and the whole technical side of photography.” al cage; a cave where a sleeping black bear and its cubs are monitored by biologists

After starting out on her own, she did some editorial work for the New York studying hibernation.

Times magazine before successfully applying for a Guggenheim grant for a tentative

Like an Annie Leibovitz of the conceptual world, Simon seems to possess work-in-progress that eventually became her first book, The Innocents. Published to considerable clout when it comes to both access and control. Her mixture of tenacconsiderable acclaim in 2003, it set the tone in both its scope and ambition for much ity and charm seems to have worked wonders on organisations not known for their of what was to follow. In large format portraits and extended texts, The Innocents openness: the Church of Scientology, the Ku Klux Klan and the Prisoner of War Interdocuments American victims of miscarriages of justice, various men – and just one rogation Resistance Programme run by Team Delta, a private body run by former US woman – who have served time for violent crimes they did not commit. military personnel. (Ironically, one of the few organisations that denied her access was

Its subtext is photography’s role, even complicity, in the wrongful convicDisney, whose spokesperson sent her a fax that read: “Especially during these violent tions, most of which were often obtained through the police’s use of photographs, times, I personally believe that the magical spell cast on guests that visit our theme Polaroids and mugshots of the accused in witness corroboration. “The Innocents is parks is particularly important to protect, and helps to provide them with an importvery much about the use and misuse of photography, “ says Simon. “I would often take ant fantasy they can escape to.” It was, she told Interview Magazine, “better that any the subjects back to the scene of the crime, a scene that they had never before been to, photograph I could have ever produced”.) but were forever linked to. The place that had changed their lives forever. Like some of

An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar is one of those rare phothe chapters in A Living Man Declared Dead, The Innocents is about people suddenly tography books that struck a chord with both photography buffs and the wider public. caught up in a narrative that is not their own.”

In his introduction, Salman Rushdie pinpointed why: “In a historical period in which

Until she undertook A Living Man Declared Dead, Simon’s work was, as she many people are making such great efforts to conceal the truth from the mass of the puts it, “about issues of power, mainly American power, at a historical moment when people, an artist like Taryn Simon is an invaluable counter-force. Democracy needs governance and power structures are destabilising and changing due to unpredictable visibility, accountability, light… Somehow, Simon has persuaded a good few denizens forces like the global economy, environmental changes and asymmetrical warfare”. of hidden worlds not to scurry for shelter when the light is switched on, as cockroach-

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Rotman | Photographic Expertise

“...I never want to say that I understand or somehow know the subject. In fact, it’s more that I don’t know.”

Last year, Simon published Contraband, a book of relatively humble ambition, for which she spent four days without sleep at the US Customs and Border Protection site and the US Postal Service international mail facility at JFK airport in New York. The book is another visual inventory, this time of 1,075 seized items, some bizarre (deer penis, cow dung toothpaste, a dead bird), some mundane (sausages, spices, pumpkins).

“People imagine customs officers seizing familiar threats – drugs or weapons – but most of the seized items were, of themselves, incredibly mundane. I was fascinated by the idea that a banal thing like a banana or an apple could suddenly assume a threatening identity because it is in the contraband room.”

In both her creative ambition and conceptual reach, Simon is at the vanguard of a relatively new kind of photography that evades easy categorisation and often blurs the boundaries between reportage, conceptualism and portraiture. Alongside the likes of Jim Goldberg, winner of this year’s Deutsche Börse prize, and Paul Graham, whose work is currently on show at the Whitechapel Gallery, she makes work that straddles the worlds of documentary photography and fine art.

“A Living Man Declared Dead is a really important work because it draws on various often exclusive traditions,” says Simon Baker. “It has the tenacity we associate with photojournalism and the practices and presentation of art photography. In a way, it’s bringing the real world – politics in the broadest sense – into galleries and museums. That is not an easy thing to do, but photography can do it very well and this particular show is an amazing example of a complex and ambitious project that contains within its presentation all the things you need to understand about it.”

That may well be so, but I also suspect that, for the casual or curious viewer, it may prove a demanding, even frustrating, experience, not least because the ambition and complexity of the idea almost overwhelms the actual work on the walls – a dilemma that is at the heart of much high-end conceptual art. In one way, too, Simon’s work also refutes the long held notion that a great photograph should speak for itself, much of its impact resting on the interrelation of image and text, the latter giving the former much of its power and resonance.

With A Living Man Declared Dead, she has arrived at a place where, visually, all extraneous style and embellishment, even context, has been discarded. The portraits that make up each individual bloodline are arranged in grids and are unadorned and undramatic. They have a certain cumulative power but certainly do not possess the intrigue or the mystery of the images in An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar. This, it turns out, is intentional.

“I think I’ve just gotten tired of photography in a way,” she says, revealingly, at one point, “and am trying to use it as a simple recorder allowing the construction of collections and associations that disturb the value of the single image and underscore issues of translation. Certainly the progression of my work has very much been a shedding of style and embellishment. The neutral background of the non-place behind many of my subjects corresponds to this erasure.”

The neutral portraits of individual bloodlines, arranged in scientific grids against white backgrounds, and hung in a huge gallery space where, at Simon’s insistence, the walls are ultra-white and the lighting ultra-bright, are punctuated by blank spaces that represent the missing, the dead or those who refused to have their photograph taken. This is a project, then, as these absences attest, about the limits of photography – a strange place for a young photographer to end up. It will be interesting

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Top, Left: Ski Dubai, The fist indoor ski resort in the Middle East, Sheikh Zayed Road, Dubai

Taryn Simon in Purple, FW 2011, Camille Bidault-Waddington

For all that, though, she rejects the label “political artist” and its connotations.

“The work eludes that kind of categorisation intentionally, though, of course, it may activate something political in the viewer or resonate with them in a political way.

But I don’t have an agenda. I guess a lot of what I do is underpinned by anxiety. But I am also anxious about photography and its role. I try to keep a clear distance from the subject.”

to see where she goes next.

As a young girl, Taryn Simon was literally surrounded by photographs that were both hidden and unfamiliar. ‘My father took tons of pictures,’ she explains, ‘There were Kodachrome slides everywhere, and sometimes he would get us all together and give these formal slideshows.’ Whereas most American families might gather in their living room to relive a recent birthday party, an anniversary, a trip to the beach, or a holiday at Disneyworld, the Simon’s slideshows were very different. Whilst working for the State Department, Simon’s father had been stationed in the USSR at the height of the Cold War, in Bangkok during the Vietnam War, and had travelled to Afghanistan, Iran and Israel on government business in subsequent years, and he always photographed these trips extensively. In a time when most Americans were hardly aware of the world beyond their country’s borders, Simon was being fed first-hand accounts of the state of affairs in the most shadowy international posts within contemporary American history.

Describing herself as ‘a bit of a hippy kid’, Simon initially pursued environmental sciences when she began at Brown University in 1993, but she quickly transferred to a degree in art semiotics, at the same time taking every opportunity to study photography at the neighbouring Rhode Island School of Design. ‘You were only meant to take one RISD class per term, but I was always over there and was very insistent that I be allowed to take more classes, so they ended up practically giving me a photography education for free.’ Between terms, Simon would assist any photographer that would let her, ‘Including a Toys R’ Us catalogue photographer for a whole summer,’ she says with both a touch of pride and embarrassment.

Simon seems to possess a rare instinct for dogged perseverance, and just a few years after finishing university, she was already freelancing for various publications including the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, travelling as far as the Caucuses to photograph injured Chechen rebels, and to Cuba to document Castro and the opulent Palace of the Revolution. Yet her remarkable ambitiousness drove her towards work that may have a greater longevity – ‘something that wouldn’t end up in the garbage pail a week later’ - and could make a more lasting impression than conventional photojournalism. In 2001 she applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship, one of the most prestigious, generous and creatively liberating grants in the world, and one that has also sponsored some of the greatest photographic portfolios of the last century, by the likes of Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, Bruce Davidson, Joel Sternfeld, Mitch Epstein and most famously, Robert Frank’s The Americans. Much to her own surprise, she was awarded it. ‘My thesis was very tight, but I never thought that I’d get it’, she explains, ‘Once I did, it gave me the freedom, financially, to put all of my time and energy into my own work’.

The resulting series, The Innocents, came about through collaboration with The Innocents Project, an organization founded by leading civil rights attorneys Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck, which seeks to exonerate American inmates who have been wrongfully convicted. In the photographs, Simon took a rather frank but fascinating approach, making a formal portrait of each ‘innocent’ in a location that was vital to the legal case against them; the scene of misidentification, the scene of arrest, the alibi location or the scene of the crime itself. Not only do the project’s conceptual founda-

December 2016 | Issue 13

Interior of Fidel Castro’s Palace of the Revolution, 2003 tions effectively question the justice system, but the actual images also point to the malevolent role that photography itself often plays in the falsification of facts and the manipulation of the truth. As she writes in the book’s forward, ‘Photography’s ability to blur truth and fiction is one of its most compelling qualities. But when misused as part of a prosecutor’s arsenal, this ambiguity can have severe, even lethal consequences…[P]hotography’s ambiguity, beautiful in one context, can be devastating in another.’

Stylistically, The Innocents adopted the ‘narrative’ aesthetic dominant in the 1990s – Gregory Crewdson, Philip-Lorca DiCorcia, etc.– which grew in importance and popularity as photography’s accuracy was not only called into question, but also became a primary source of inspiration for many photographers. Today, the genre is very familiar: expressionless figures stoically inhabiting ordinary yet otherworldly realms, the scenarios’ falsity further emphasized by overtly cinematographic key-lighting and an eerily stagnant atmosphere. But as Simon explains, this approach was not flippantly appropriated to simply cater to art-world tastes. Instead, it was chosen precisely because, both visually and conceptually, it suited her subject matter perfectly.

‘I was going to the scene of a crime with people who had never been there, because they hadn’t committed the crime. So the light was very much used as an interrogating force, which also separated the subject from the background. It was a way of articulating, within the image, this odd relationship between the person and the place.’

Ultimately, the series is relentless and remarkably powerful specifically because of it considered consistency, and it is clear from what followed that Simon is certainly not one to rely on aesthetic gimmickry or typological repetition to bring form and meaning to her work.

Simon’s most recent portfolio, An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, is an incredibly diverse and astounding tome; so far, the twenty-first century’s finest response to a longstanding tradition within American photography, described by Robert Frank in his own 1954 Guggenheim application as, ‘The making of a broad, voluminous picture record of things American, past and present.’ In the same proposal, Frank presented a catalogue of potential subject-matter for what eventually became The Americans: ‘a town at night, a parking lot, a supermarket, a highway, the man who owns three cars and the man who owns none, the farmer and his children, a new house and a warped clapboard house, the dictation of taste, the dream of grandeur, advertising, neon lights, the faces of the leaders and the faces of the followers, gas tanks and post offices and backyards.’ American Index presents a resolutely more obscure collection of curiosities, but just as accurately reflects the United States at a

very particular point in its history: a nuclear waste storage facility, a ‘corpse farm’, a serpent handler, Mexicans detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, a cryopreservation unit, a hibernating bear, Death-Star II, transatlantic sub-marine telecommunication cables reaching American soil, an inbred white tiger, stacks of sexual assault kits awaiting DNA analysis, a Braille edition of Playboy, and so on. Whereas earlier photographers sought to define America through that which was common – ‘elevating the casual, the everyday and the literal into specific, permanent symbols’, as Lincoln Kirstein described it in his introduction to Walker Evan’s American Photographs - Simon chooses to symbolise the country’s current incarnation precisely through that which is official, exceptional and freakishly extraordinary. ‘It’s my response to a moment when America is looking to understand things, and to dig deeper outside of its borders. I wanted to do the same thing, but within American borders.

That’s why it’s also called ‘Unfamiliar’. Because I didn’t want it to be me saying, “Look, I got into all the deepest pockets.” That’s not the point, and I can’t stand photography that pretends to understand or know its subject.’

“...I always try to create this distance where the viewer can see that, like them, I’m not in the know. I’m at a distance too.”

As Simon points out, like the medium of photography itself, there’s something remarkably refreshing about the apparent promise of transparency that these images offer but such superficial notions of clarity are rapidly compromised and tainted once we realise that, despite having vicariously been given access to previously alien worlds, we still know little more that we did before. ‘In each photograph there is good and evil, and that reflects the time we’re in right now. There are these polar forces at play, and it’s just so confusing’, she explains. ‘Whenever you look behind the curtain, you realise that what you’ve come to rely on, this secure force, is actually crumbling and mouldy. That’s reality, but seeing it isn’t going to cure anything. It’s only going to create further awareness of the mould.’ Also in his introduction to American Photographs, written nearly seventy years ago, Lincoln Kirstein poetically proclaims, ‘Here are the records of the age before an imminent collapse. [These] pictures exist to testify to the symptoms of waste and selfishness that caused the ruin, and to salvage whatever was splendid for the future reference of the survivors.’ Now that does seem familiar.

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THE DOCTOR IS IN.

Tom Kray Motion pictures are normally exposed and projected at 24 frames per second, but when pictures are made at a higher rate and projected at normal speed, the apparent movement is slowed down. Harold “Doc” Edgerton designed highspeed motion-picture cameras that could expose as many as six thousand to fifteen thousand frames per second. When these films were projected at normal speed (24 frames per second), very highspeed events appeared – and could be studied – in extremely slow motion.

December 2016 | Issue 13

“Bullet Through Balloons,” 1959 .22 caliber bullet.

Every time you use the flash on your smartphone or camera, you should give silent praise to Harold Eugene Edgerton. In the era of vacuum tubes and radios the size of tables, Edgerton created a way to stop the world; a bullet passing through an apple; a footballer’s boot connecting with a ball; the crown-like splash created from a single drop of milk. He was the first man to harness electricity to freeze time to an instant.

Edgerton’s iconic images would be difficult enough to create today, even with computers on hand to open and close the shutter and fire the flash. But Edgerton took his pictures in the days of analogue, recording them on a motion picture camera converted to shoot at previously impossible speeds, and lighting them with an electric flash he invented himself. Intricate geometries happening so fast the human eye is incapable of comprehending them were suddenly captured for all to marvel at.

“He captured wonderful, captivating images that transcend the boundaries between science, art and entertainment.”

To decades of students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) he was known as ‘Doc’. To the pioneering underwater explorer Jacques Cousteau, who collaborated with him, ‘Papa Flash’. Edgerton was born in 1903 in Nebraska, and became passionate about two things – photography and electricity. He was taught how to use a camera by his uncle, and worked for a local power company before being accepted as a student at MIT. During an experiment using a rudimentary computer, Edgerton found the overheating warning lights (blinking at 60 times a second) seemed to freeze the moving parts of its motor as if they were standing still. It gave Edgerton the idea that bright, split-second bursts of light could illuminate this high-speed world. In those days, there were no high-speed films allowing you to shoot with ambient light unless you used a shutter speed lasting many seconds - pretty useless unless your subject was stock still.

Flash was vital in giving enough light for these ‘slow’ films to capture moving objects.

Edgerton’s flash could fire a burst of light that lasted only 10 microseconds – 1/100,000th of a second – and replaced the mercury gas with xenon, which allowed the flash tubes to be smaller. It meant Edgerton had a device that could freeze the fastest bullet or rapidly beating hummingbird wing. The basic design still lives on in the electronic flashes we use today.

But more than this, says Dr Michael Pritchard, head of the Royal Photographic Society (RPS), Edgerton was using high-speed photography as a diagnostic tool. ”Perhaps his greatest legacy (aside from his images) is his use of, and development, of

a photographic technique as a tool for engineers to solve problems and to examine how machines operated.”

Photographic giant Kodak was initially sniffy, and thought Edgerton’s device would struggle to sell 50 examples. The professor later took a night-time photo of a boxing match, perfectly capturing the two fighters, and wired the photo to the nation’s newspapers to prove his point. The age of the electronic flash was born and many, many millions have been made since.

Edgerton’s pioneering work wasn’t confined to the studio. During World War II he developed a giant version of the electronic flash – that could be carried in the bomb bay of a modified bomber; he proved its worth to sceptical intelligence chiefs by illuminating the ancient site of Stonehenge on a moonless light. The flash system was later used to take photos of the drop zones in Normandy ahead of Allied paratroop landings, showing areas devoid of German troops that could be used as landing zones.

After World War II, Edgerton created his most technically impressive photographs – ones which captured the very first stages of an atomic explosion. No camera then devised could open and close its shutter quickly enough, so Edgerton built his own (called the Rapatronic). The light from the explosion activated a photo-electric cell on the front of the camera, which opened and closed the camera. By 1950, Edgerton’s technical team had managed to cut the shutter’s opening time to as little as 1/4,000,000th of a second; the atomic explosions he captured at Eniwetok Atoll in 1952 (from several miles away) are surreal orbs, looking like huge balls of melting wax.

Edgerton, who was still working when he died in 1990 at the age of 86, continued his photographic experiments throughout his academic and inventing career. His images became lauded not just as feats of technical prowess but as pieces of modern art. “A great populariser, Edgerton’s photographs with their unusual subject matter, sharp detail, strong use of colour and formal composition appeal to a very broad audience,” says Harding. “They confirm the extraordinary power of photography and create a sense of wonder from ordinary, everyday events such as a falling drop of milk.”

“Don’t make me out to be an artist. I am an engineer. I am after the facts. Only the facts.”

Even if you don’t know the name Harold Doc Edgerton you’ve almost certainly seen some of his work. If you’re a photographer than you’ve probably used the equipment

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he had a hand in developing decades ago. Harold Doc Edgerton is the father of high speed flash photography.

A professor of electrical engineering at M.I.T. , Edgerton changed the way photographers use light to freeze moving subjects and the way the rest of us see the world. He’s best known for changing the stroboscope from a little used piece of laboratory equipment into essential photo gear. Even if that’s all he had ever done, we’d probably still celebrate him because strobes are kind of a big deal in this business, but Edgerton did not stop there. Not content to change the photography world, he kept his eyes peeled for other things he could flash.

Edgerton first got the idea of using the electronic flash of the stroboscope to photograph everyday objects while working on his Sc.D. thesis. He credits the idea to fellow M.I.T. scientist Charles Stark “Doc” Draper. (Apparently there is only one possible nickname for M.I.T. professors.)

While the first thing Edgerton photographed was tap water flowing out of a faucet, he soon moved on to more dramatic subjects like freezing bullets being shot through objects like apples and balloons.

In 1939 Edgerton was contacted by Major Goddard from the Army’s photographic laboratory to help them achieve better nocturnal arial photography. Major Goddard wanted to know if there was a flash large enough to photograph an enemy target from a mile in the air. Edgerton told him that such a thing didn’t exist but saw no reason why it shouldn’t be done and that he’d get right on it.

Edgerton remained a professor at M.I.T. until shortly before his death in 1990. One of the last classes he taught was an undergraduate class in insect and bird photography.

If ever an inventor left vivid, visual evidence of his achievements, it is Harold E. “Doc” Edgerton, who created some of the most memorable photographs of all time. In addition, Edgerton was an educator, engineer, and explorer.

Born in 1903 in Fremont, Nebraska, Edgerton grew up in nearby Aurora, where as a teenager, he learned photography from an uncle and built himself a darkroom in his home. Summer work at Nebraska Power & Light sparked his interest in the generation of electricity, and so he chose to study electrical engineering at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, where he earned his BS in 1925.

After beginning graduate school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1926, where he earned an SM (1927) and DSc (1931), Edgerton began working with the stroboscope. As many people are aware, a stroboscope generates brief, repeated bursts of light, which allow an observer to quickly view moving objects in a series of static, as-if frozen images, rather than a single continuous blur. By synchronizing strobe flashes with the motion being examined (for example, the spinning of engine rotors), then taking a series of photos through an open shutter at the rate of many flashes per second, Edgerton invented ultra-high-speed and stop-action photography in 1931.

Before long, Edgerton’s astonishing photographs of everyday events won

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Harold Edgerton © 2010 MIT. Courtesy of MIT Museum

him acclaim around the world. His “Coronet” milk drop photo was featured in the New York Museum of Modern Art’s first photography exhibit in 1937. In time, Edgerton would capture images of athletes competing (1938), hummingbirds hovering (1953), bullets bursting balloons (1959), and blood coursing through capillaries (1964).

At a less aesthetic level, Edgerton had not only paved the way for the modern electronic flash, he had given physicists a new means of analyzing the dynamics of fluids, air currents, and engines. The U.S. Army also saw the practical side of Edgerton’s work. During World War II, Edgerton was commissioned to develop a superpowered flash for aerial photography. Edgerton’s system allowed airplanes to do nocturnal reconnaissance, including the otherwise impossible documentation of Axis troop movements under the cover of darkness in the weeks preceding D-Day in 1944.

After the War, Edgerton founded a company, EG&G Inc., with two former students, Kenneth Germeshausen and Herbert Grier (1947). Under contract with the Atomic Energy Commission, Edgerton and his colleagues designed timing and firing systems for atomic bomb testing and invented a camera that could photograph an atomic explosion from seven miles away in 1947. EG&G also developed high-powered strobe lights for commercial use in apparatus ranging from lighthouses to copying machines.

In 1953, Edgerton entered yet another realm of inventing when he began a longtime collaboration with fellow inventor Jacques-Yves Cousteau in underwater exploration. Edgerton performed the first-ever underwater time-lapse photography in 1968. He also invented various sonar devices, including the “thumper,” which analyzed the rock of the sea bed (1960), and the “boomer,” which gave a seismic profile of the sea floor (1961). Edgerton also located and explored numerous underwater ruins and shipwrecks between 1966 and 1985. In fact, the first detailed photographs of the Titanic were taken with a camera designed by him in 1987.

During the course of his career, Edgerton earned dozens of patents for his devices. He also won the U.S. Army’s Medal of Freedom (1946), the National Medal of Science (1973), and induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame (1986), among other honors, and wrote or co-wrote four books. All the while, Edgerton, who had joined the MIT faculty in 1927, was teaching and directing research. Long before his colleagues elected him Institute Professor in 1966, he was one of MIT’s most popular teachers. His “Strobe Alley” lab was – as it remains – legendary. As the Boston Patent Law Association and Boston Museum of Science put it, when naming Edgerton their New England Inventor of the Year in 1982, “through his marvelous medium, he has captured and revealed new beauty and order in both nature and industry.”

The late MIT Professor Harold “Doc” Edgerton enchanted the world with his high-speed flash photography, which could “freeze time” down to the millionth of a second — as a bullet tore through a banana or a droplet landed in a pool milk (two examples of his well-known photos). His photography devices provided physicists new ways to analyze the dynamics of fluids, air and engines and aided in World War II aerial reconnaissance. He also took his cameras underwater. Oceans at MIT remembered

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Harold Edgerton: Hammer Smashing Light Bulb, 1933 Edgerton’s major contributions to ocean exploration and marine biology on the 23rd anniversary of his death by pouring through MIT’s extensive Edgerton Digital Collections Project to unearth the passion that brought vision under the sea.

Harold “Doc” Edgerton was first drawn to underwater photography because of a leaky box. It all started in the mid-1930s, when E. Newton Harvey, a bioluminescence expert, approached him for advice on photographing phosphorescent deep-sea fishes for an upcoming book. Never one to refuse helping anyone, Edgerton assembled the camera and instructed Newton to encase it in a watertight box to lower into the depths. But soon, upon bumping into the author in Harvard Square, Edgerton learned that the box had distorted and cracked, allowing seawater in and ruining Newton’s project. From then on, Edgerton was determined to “see through” seawater with a camera of his own making. “Why not a spherical design or even a cylindrical one?” Edgerton wrote once. “Soon I was sketching all sorts of designs.”

Water scatters light, creating “fog” within short distances, which makes taking anything but close-up photos underwater difficult. Edgerton knew this, and got right to work in his MIT lab devising lamps that could handle all ocean challenges: they produced high-intensity light, possessed mechanical strength to withstand great pressures, and required high efficiency batteries for hours-long missions. By 1937, Edgerton had designed his first successful underwater camera for oceanographic research in collaboration with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution researchers.

Soon came a series of almost magical tools for marine biologists, who were frustrated that camera lights scared animals away. For example, Edgerton designed a camera he called an “interruption camera,” which functioned when a passing sea creature interrupted a light beam, triggering the camera shutter and its rapid flash. In the early 1940s, he applied high-speed motion cameras to the tricky problem of tracking rapidly moving marine animals, such as seahorses. Seemingly motionless organisms were revealed as quite busy life forms in Edgerton’s underwater time-lapse photography — a tool not just for spying on sea urchins, sand dollars and starfish, but also for studying erosion patterns. Not until the late 1950s did Edgerton invent a camera that could capture animal bioluminescence at depths of 6,000 meters — the problem that started it all.

Edgerton marveled that these images revealed “a host of items unsuspected and illuminate a variety of others which for long have resided in the limbo of half-knowledge.”

The year 1952 was a game changer for Edgerton. In that year, the National Geographic informed Edgerton that a relatively unknown Frenchman named Jacques Cousteau was interested in speaking about underwater photographic experiments. Not two hours after Edgerton picked up Cousteau at Boston’s South Station was the explorer in the MIT swimming pool testing out an experimental camera of Edgerton’s. That day, Cous-

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teau and Edgerton planned projects to explore under the sea off the southern coast of France.

I n partnership with Cousteau, Edgerton began to probe the ocean floor with sound, eclipsing his underwater photography achievements. On their first expedition in the summer of 1953, the duo realized they needed a way to tell the distance between the camera and the sea floor while lowering the equipment into the water. On the spot, Edgerton invented the “pinger,” a sound-pulsing device attached to the camera. When the device received a sonar signal from the sea floor, it would trigger the strobe lights and camera. The operator would then examine the echo to check whether the camera was in a suitable range.

Cousteau and Edgerton soon developed a tight friendship; “My Dear Papa-Flash!” Cousteau would exclaim in handwritten messages about their joint ventures.

Aboard the Calypso, the two men and crew went on to locate and explore many underwater ruins and shipwrecks, which they continued around the world into the 1980s.

Such underwater archaeology was made possible by several of Edgerton’s sonar devices, such as the “thumper,” which analyzed the seabed rock, and the “boomer,” which provided a seismic profile of the ocean floor.

Edgerton decided to play around with sonar devices, shifting the sonar beam sideways. When towed behind a ship, the “side-scan sonar” device creates continuous images of the seafloor. Edgerton’s former student and colleague, Martin Klein, later developed the first commercial dual-channel side-scan sonar, which was used to find the Titanic wreck.

Edgerton won numerous awards for his work, including the National Medal of Science in 1973; he even won an Oscar for a stroboscopic film. But he is remembered at MIT, most of all, for his generosity, gregariousness and teaching talent.

One former student, Kim Vandiver, professor of mechanical and ocean engineering and director of the MIT Edgerton Center, worked as Edgerton’s teaching assistant in the 1970s, when the inventor was past retirement age, but still running his lab. Vandiver’s first project allowed him to photograph the tiny bubbles that come off the tips of a rapidly whirring propeller, jumpstarting his future in ocean engineering at MIT. Vandiver remembers the charm of his former mentor:

“He was one of those people who could make you feel, when the conversation was going on, that you were the only person in the world, and he did that to thousands of people.”