Splash of a Milk Drop
Sheet: 16 1/16 × 13 1/8 inches (40.8 × 33.34 cm)
New Acquisitions to the Hallmark Photographic Collection, 1980-1983. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, April 1 – May 1, 1983.
Twentieth-Century Photographers: Selections from the HPC. Columbus College of Art & Design, Columbus, OH, March 28 - April 27, 1996, no cat.
How can photographs reveal what we otherwise cannot see with the naked eye?
While teaching as a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harold Edgerton invented a technique to record scientific phenomena that would otherwise be invisible to the human eye. To achieve this, Edgerton used stroboscopic photography, combining ultra-high shutter speeds with bursts of flash to "freeze" movement. Edgerton produced a black and white image of a milk drop falling into a pool of the liquid in 1936, recreating the experiment in vibrant color (pictured here) in 1957.
Given by Hallmark Cards, Inc. to The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 2005.
