VERNACULAR NASA ENGINEERING POLAROIDS

William Deveikis
VERNACULAR NASA ENGINEERING POLAROIDS

Photographs: William Deveikis

Pictures: 104

Year: 1960-1967

Comments: 104 Polaroid photographs (9 x 11.5 cm. prints; across two formats) 49 loose prints, and a further 55 ACCO-bound. In very good condition. A Stunning set!!!

A striking collection of 104 Polaroid photographs (9 x 11.5 cm. prints; across two formats) from the estate of aeronautical engineer William Deveikis (1926-2019). With 49 loose prints, and a further 55 ACCO-bound, the latter with some manuscript annotations to wide margins.

Working at NASA's Langley Research Center from 1951-1983, the engineer William Deveikis experimented on the stress-thresholds of aeronautic materials, simulating the extreme pressures and heat of supersonic flight and space travel. He was also a talented photographer.
In this group of Polaroids, Deveikis appears primarily concerned with the aesthetic merits of his photography, rather than with the objective documentation of his experiments. Amongst the modern objects and textures of his flight materials, Deveikis achieves a kind of Space-age Pictorialism.
Just less than half of the Polaroids depict a series of Deveikis' scale-model experiments from the early 1960s using Langley's cutting-edge wind tunnel technologies, which could simulate the stresses of supersonic flight. Another 55 Polaroids—bound in a pseudo-flipbook—document his 1967 shadowgraph experiments, using flow-visualization techniques that have reached modern expression in pandemic-era transmission graphics.