Has anyone ever taken a better photo of Stonehenge than the one Harold Edgerton snapped on a dark night near the end of the Second World War, 1944 to be exact? I doubt it. I seriously doubt it. When has Stonehenge ever looked so mysterious, so alien, so theatrical, so totteringly old, so alive, so Lord of the Ringsy? Shouldn’t Gandalf be lurking here somewhere?
Edgerton took this photo during a secret Allied military experiment. Someone–probably Edgerton himself–had the brilliant idea of putting a very powerful strobe flash in the weapons bay of a night flying bomber. This way the bomber could be used for nighttime aerial reconnaissance photography. To test the system, the airforce picked a target that lay off in the countryside, away from large cities: Stonehenge. And one dark night, it sent a pilot out flying 1500 feet above Stonehenge. As he soared over the megalith, he triggered the flash.
Down on the ground, Edgerton was waiting. He had propped his camera up on a fence post and as a brilliant light from above suddenly bathed the stones, he snapped this incredible shot.
After the war, Edgerton had a brilliant career as a photographer. Life magazine adored his work and published it often. Edgerton also had a long teaching career at MIT. “The trick to education,” he once said, “is to teach people in such a way that they don’t realize they’re learning until it’s too late.”
I think Edgerton was a true magician with a camera. That night at Stonehenge, he was Gandalf.
(I first saw this incredible photo at Geoff Manaugh’s wonderful blog, BLDG BLOG. I highly recommend this blog if you haven’t seen it. Readers who want to learn more about Harold Edgerton’s work should check out Stopping Time: The Photographs of Harold Edgerton. )