1949 marked one of the peaks of Pablo Picasso's career, leading LIFE magazine to dispatch Gjon Mili to Picasso's villa in the south of France. Mili plied Picasso's creativity with his portfolio of long exposure images captured by affixing tiny lights to figure skaters and having them perform sequences in the dark. What followed was one of the greatest collaborations by two masters forever trapped in silver & celluloid to be interpreted by future generations via shades of grey.
This LIFE magazine article does the story better justice than me, so here's where I STFU, and refer to Ben Cosgrove's article:
"Picasso," LIFE magazine reported at the time, "gave Mili 15 minutes to try one experiment. He was so fascinated by the result that he posed for five sessions, projecting 30 drawings of centaurs, bulls, Greek profiles and his signature. Mili took his photographs in a darkened room, using two cameras, one for side view, another for front view. By leaving the shutters open, he caught the light streaks swirling through space."
This series of photographs, known ever since as Picasso's "light drawings," were made with a small electric light in a darkened room; in effect, the images vanished as soon as they were created and yet they still live, six decades later, in Mili's playful, hypnotic images. Many of them were also put on display in early 1950 in a show at New York's Museum of Modern Art.
