LIFE.com offers a selection of marvelous photographs, stroboscopic and otherwise, by the great Gjon Mili. Here are technically brilliant pictures that fiddle with moments, junctures, sequences — and in the process offer a playful commentary on the slippery relationship between mere mortals and the temporal. Our favourite is this collage of Alfred Hitchcock directing, what can only be described, as himself.
“To see a world in a grain of sand,” William Blake famously wrote, “and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour.” At their best, Gjon Mili’s stroboscopic photographs not only mirror Blake’s vision, but celebrate — with an unsentimental, clear-eyed wonder — the reality of sentient beings moving through both space and time.
Click the pic to see the series.