Gjon Mili’s stroboscopic pictures

Back in 2011, a corner with 15 pictures by late Albanian-American photographer Gjon Mili was set up in the cultural centre of the southeastern city of Korca where Mili was born in the early 20th century.
TIRANA, Dec. 16 – Gjon Mili, an Albanian- American photographer who was among the first to use the electronic flash to capture people and things that move too fast for the naked eye, has been featured in a series of stroboscopic pictures by UK’s The Guardian.
“Alfred Hitchcock clowning on set, Sammy Davis Jr jiving in Porgy and Bess and ping-pong players and javelin throwers in action … the great experimenter Gjon Mili created these cutting-edge images in the 40s using a new flash invented by MIT professor Dr Harold Edgerton,” says the Guardian.
Mili, a longtime contributor to Life magazine, began using the electronic flash in 1937. With it, he would freeze an instant of action in a photograph or, with a rapid series of successive flashes, make a friezelike study of successive phases of the same action.
It was with a series of flashes, called stroboscopic photography, that he created his version of the Duchamps painting ”Nude Descending a Staircase.’
He is perhaps best known for a photograph of Lindy dancers in midair and one of Pablo Picasso as he sketched a figure in the air with a pen light. ‘The Definitive Picture.’
Back in 2011, a corner with 15 pictures by late Albanian-American photographer Gjon Mili was set up in the cultural centre of the southeastern city of Korca where Mili was born in the early 20th century.
The Gjon Mili corner was an initiative by the Korca municipality to commemorate the 20th century photographer in his hometown of Korca which he left at a very young age. Born in 1904 in Korca, Gjon Mili went to the United States in 1923. Fifteen years later, he was a photographer for Life magazine, a relationship that continued until his death in 1984, and his assignments took him to the Riviera (Picasso); to Prades, France (Pablo Casals in exile); to Israel (Adolf Eichmann in captivity); to Florence, Athens, Dublin, Berlin, Venice, Rome, and Hollywood to photograph celebrities and artists, sports events, and concerts, and sculptures and architecture.
Working with Harold Eugene Edgerton of MIT, Gjon Mili was a pioneer since the 1930s in the use of photoflash to capture a sequence of actions in one photograph.