Jul 21, 2008 - 14:42:11 CDT
(This is a column you may wish to read while using the Internet to look at the photographs in question.)It's amazing what we discover when we are looking for something else. I've been reading biographies of J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-67), the father of the atomic bomb. I'm fascinated by Oppenheimer, who was one of the most extraordinary and paradoxical men of the 20th century.
What interests me most is that the great physicist did not seem to wrestle with the ethical implications of the atomic bomb (he called it the "gadget") until the first test occurred at Alamogordo, N.M., on July 16, 1945. Then - and only then, apparently - Oppenheimer had an inrush of moral consciousness about the grave thing he had done. Like the Greek mythic figure Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and suffered profoundly for his crime, Oppen-heimer became a haunted, even tragic figure in the two decades after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
At Alamogordo, when the world's first atomic explosion occurred at 5:29:45 a.m., Monday, July 16, 1945, Oppen-heimer suddenly found himself flashing to a passage from Hindu sacred literature. He had learned Sanskrit just for fun while teaching physics at Berkeley. As the nuclear age began, with a mushroom cloud that reached 38,000 feet, Oppenheimer blurted out a line from the Bhagavad Gita, "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."
The minute I first read that, a dozen or so years ago, I knew I wanted to know more, much more, about the scientist who spoke those words on that occasion. If I had to list the 10 most interesting people I have ever encountered in history, Oppenheimer would be high on the list. If you are interested, read Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin's "Ameri-can Prometheus." It won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006. I can assure you it requires no technical understanding.
In reading another biography, Jeremy Bernstein's "Oppenheimer: Portrait of an Enigma," I learned that Oppen-heimer had been photographed jumping, in an expensive three-piece suit, in his Spartan office at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. It's an amazing portrait of an amazing man. Oppenheimer was thin to the point of gauntness. He is a picture of perfect elegance, one arm stretching up towards the ceiling and heaven, the other point-ing, a little less emphatically, towards the floor ... Behind him is a blackboard partly inscribed with mathematical notations. Somehow the greatness of the man is clearly visible in the remarkable black and white photograph, and the vaulting ambition, and the sense that the usual boundaries of life are unable to contain him.
The photographer was a Latvian man named Philippe Halsman (1906-79), who came to the United States in 1940, and happened upon the notion of getting his subjects to jump in 1952.
The whole thing started when Halsman was photographing the Ford family for Life Magazine to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Ford Motor Co. "I went to Grosse Pointe and found that the family consisted of nine bub-bling adults and 11 laughing and crying children and babies." It was, said Halsman, a "cataclysmic sitting," by which he meant that it was an ordeal to create a more than blah photograph of a group so large and so stiff.
Mrs. Edsel Ford, the hostess, eventually offered Halsman a highball. Suddenly inspired, Halsman asked, "May I take a picture of you jumping?" "I have never seen an expression of greater astonishment," he later recalled. Mrs. Ford asked if he expected her to jump in her high heels. He did not. So she took of her shoes and jumped.
Thereafter, Halsman routinely ended his photo sessions by asking his subjects to jump. Odd though these requests must have seemed, coming from a famous photographer taking pictures of prominent individuals for important publications, a surprising number of people agreed to take the leap of faith. The photographs are collected in Phil-ippe Halsman's "Jump Book", first printed in 1959, reprinted in 1986. The Oppenheimer photograph is, in my opin-ion, the finest in the entire series.
Halsman argued that it is impossible to maintain an artificial pose while jumping. Jump photos, therefore, are a kind of Rorschach Test in which the core of a person's soul is revealed.
Some people refused to jump. Lord Mountbatten refused, period, and the great British philosopher Bertrand Russell, who understood what Halsman was trying to accomplish, explained that "he did not want to divulge his character." The great American journalist Edward R. Murrow refused, as did the secretary general of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjold.
There are, of course, people you would expect to jump. Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis jumped together, with the usual hilarity. Dick Clark jumped-no surprise there. Carol Channing jumped-and a mighty jump it was. Red Skelton, Jackie Gleason, Phil Silvers, Milton Berle, and Steve Allen all jumped, as did Lucille Ball (splendidly), Dinah Shore (elegantly), Sophia Loren (not so sexy here).
Probably the most famous of all the jump photos is of the painter Salvador Dali. Not only is the surrealist Dali fro-zen in mid-jump, but everything else in the photograph is suspended in mid-air too: three flying cats, a menacing chair, an easel holding one of Dali's paintings, and a wide swath of water that looks like the Gulf Stream. It took 26 exposures to get the photograph right. Two things come to mind. First, I'd like to see the other 25 frames of what must have been an extremely frustrating photo session. Second, although I do not see a "no cats were harmed during the filming of this photo classic," I assume that they fared better than the famous painter, who must have been com-pletely exhausted before the successful photograph was snapped.
It's an anti-gravitation tour de force, though Dali, who is holding paintbrushes, looks as if he might possibly just have sat down on a pitchfork.
It is little short of amazing that Halsman was able to talk such staid folks as Margaret Truman, Adlai Stevenson, Richard Nixon, and above all the Duke and Duchess of Windsor into jumping for the camera. The usually-awkward Nixon looks balanced, calm, almost serene in the famous photograph. He should have jumped more and burgled less.
I've gazed at the Oppenheimer photograph for hours at a time lately, trying to make sense of the strange man who loosed the atomic bomb into the world, then spent the rest of his life agonizing about whether even the "big toe of the Genie" could be put back into the bottle. In 1947 Oppenheimer famously said, "In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose."
When my weak and pedestrian brain wearies of trying to make sense of the troubled genius, I turn in Halsman's book to his photograph of Audrey Hepburn jumping out of her sandals, in a blousy skirt and a tight cotton blouse. It is, in its modest way, one of the most beautiful and alluring photographs ever taken.
(Clay Jenkinson is the Theodore Roosevelt scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State University. He lives in Bismarck. Contact Jenkinson at jeffysage@aol.com.)
TrekGirl wrote on Jul 23, 2008 10:15 AM:
Harold Reimann wrote on Jul 22, 2008 8:33 PM:
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