NEW YORK, NY.- As we enter the last month of summer, Danziger Gallery presents a selection of sports images by the photographer who is credited with inventing the strobe flash, Harold Eugene Edgerton. Edgerton or “Doc” as he was affectionately known, developed an electronic technology which allowed for high-speed photography and captured moments previously unseen by the human eye.

With his new flash Edgerton was able to photographically freeze the action of such things as drops of milk falling into a saucer, bullets going through various everyday objects, and the wing motion of various birds; but he was particularly drawn to capturing the action of sports and sports greats – Bobby Jones’ golf swing; tennis champion Gussie Moran’s serve; Wes Fessler (one of the Buckeyes' greatest football players) kicking a football.

Edgerton was born in Fremont, Nebraska, in 1903 and received his doctoral degree (and his nickname “Doc”) from MIT where he taught and worked for most of his life.
Trained as an electrical engineer Doc’s experiments were initially made with relatively primitive flash tubes but in the early 1930s Edgerton developed a tube using xenon gas that could produce high-intensity bursts of light as short as 1/1,000,000 second. The xenon flash could also emit repeated bursts of light at regular and very brief intervals and was thus an ideal stroboscope. (A stroboscope or a strobe light is used to measure the rotation speed or revolution velocity of a moving object. The flash frequency of a stroboscope is adjustable to ensure accurate measurement of these parameters.)

As interesting as these images were as scientific or visual phenomena Edgerton was as much an artist as a scientist or engineer and the photographs he took over a period of several decades possessed an aesthetic beauty that was recognized by the fine art world resulting in his works being collected and exhibited in virtually every major museum in the world.