Page 74 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 74/146
Gjon Mili: Nude Descending 1942 + Martha Graham Dance Troupe (c1940).
Gjon Mili - This famous Albanian American photographer, noted for his work for Life Magazine, was a pioneer - along with his mentor, Harold Edgerton of MIT - of using strobe lights to capture stac- cato multiple exposures on single plates, producing results similar to, though in much higher resol- ution than those chrono-photographs of Étienne-Jules Marey taken in the 1880s. Mili became world famous for these ‘motion-capture’ photographs, and he was commissioned by Life Magazine to make a series of photographs of famous modern and classical ballet-dancers, athletes and others who relied on speed in action. Mili is one of those lucky people who brought together his technical higher education (at MIT studying electrical engineering) with an unusual aesthetic sensibility, a tal- ent for combining compositional ability with the technical preparation to achieve a visually interest- ing - and often revelatory or beautiful results - results that went far beyond the technical brilliance of Harold Edgerton’s scientific images (though these had a beauty of their own too - the shot by Edger- ton: Bullet through Apple (1964) is an example). Mili’s elegant Nude Descending a Staircase, 1942, 1950 etc was made in several versions as he revisited this iconic re-interpretation of Marcel Duch- amp’s famous painting of 1912 - itself suggested by Duchamp seeing the chrono-photography of scientific researcher Etienne-Jules Marey.
Gjon Mili’s fascination with the potential of his stroboscopic techniques influenced Jammin the Blues - a short film that he directed on in 1944 , and perhaps influenced Norman McLaren’s famous short-film Pas de Deux of 1968. I love this kind of emergent aesthetics - often spurred by scientific enquiry, and in Mili’s case informed by expert analysis. It seems to marry aesthetics with technology in a way that presages the use of computers to generate imagery in the 1950s and 1960s - such as Ben Laposky’s Oscillons (1952), John Whitney’s analog computer-graphics used in Alfred Hitch- cock’s Vertigo film-titles sequence (1958), or Desmond Paul Henry’s Henry Drawing Computer (c1962). But most of these experiments generated beautiful abstract forms (strangely reminiscent of Naum Gabo’s constructivist sculptural objects of the 1930s), and Gjon Mili is revealing the kinetic ‘artistic’ aspects of the human form - in dance, in sport, in work.
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Gjon Mili: Jamming the Blues 1944 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88PwJX5gyxU