The human eye is a superb instrument, able at a glance to differentiate between subtle shades of color, to function in murky darkness or seashore glare, to focus on fine print or on distant mountains, to judge size, to register movement, to measure depth. But the eye has its limits. It can perceive only the form of electromagnetic energy that we call visible light; to other almost identical forms, such as heat and X-rays, it is blind. The eye is quick enough to follow the beat of a swan's wing, but not that of a hummingbird's. At 20 feet it can distinguish an object as small as 7/100 inch across, but nothing smaller. Most limiting of all is the eye's attachment to man himself; it goes where man goes-and nowhere else.
The camera frees man from such limitations on his ability to see. No single photographic process can do all the things the eye can and yet many can do things the eye cannot. There is almost nothing that one form or another of the mechanical eye and sensitized film fails to see. To record the effects of a nuclear explosion, for instance, the Atomic Energy Commission has snapped 'pictures showing what happens in 1/200,000,000 second. Photographic plates are used to register the movements of the smallest things known-the minuscule particles produced by an atom smasher-and of the largest things known-stars that glimmer so distantly they too are invisible to the human eye.
Astronomers were among the first to put photography to work seeing the unseen. By the end of the last century they had already used the camera extensively to explore space. The photograph at the right, made by two French astronomers in 1894, shows the moon as it appeared through the large telescope at the Observatory of Paris. It is one of a series of plates comprising the first systematic photographic survey of the moon and in its time it was a revelation. Today our concept of the moon is far more detailed and comprehensive, primarily because of photographs-some taken by space robots in lunar orbit and others taken by men standing on the surface of the moon itself. And from the cameras held by those same men, we have gained a whole new perspective of our own planet, shrunk to the size of a plastic beach ball, its swirled blue, brown and white surface hanging in the black void of space.
The camera peers inward, too, revealing the infinitely fine warp and woof of matter. With the aid of X-rays it peels back the very tissues of life, laying bare the structure and ills of the human body; teamed with the microscope, it has recorded the moment of conception when an egg and spermatozoon meet.
By going where the eye cannot go and sensing what the eye cannot see, the camera has become an indispensable tool for investigating the natural world. At the same time it has provided an unexpected bonus. It is remarkable how many photographs taken purely for scientific purposes are truly beautiful simply as pictures to look at. "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," the poet John Keats once wrote. The camera, whether focused on the atom or the stars, on a dancer's movements or a city's patterns, reveals much truth -and as the pictures on the following pages show, much beauty too.
LOEWY AND PUISEUX = The Moon , 1894
LOEWY AND PUISEUX = The Moon , 1894
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