The Artist

When he was six years old, Walter LeCroy took apart his parent's box camera, looking for the motor that made the pictures. He did not find it, but he is still searching for new ways to reach the heart of photography.

Born in Alabama in 1935, he grew up in Birmingham and Decatur. By the age of ten, he began to develop his own film, and make contact prints, using a flashlight inside a ruby-colored water glass. Tinkering remained a passion throughout his early schooling. Fascinated by chemistry, he experimented with gunpowder in various forms, making firecrackers, bombs that went off in the hills outside Birmingham, and small explosives that he put on streetcar tracks. "There were no more bombs after we moved to Decatur," he says. "There I became a newspaper photographer."

LeCroy's first pictures appeared in the Decatur Daily while he was still in high school. He also worked as a stringer for the Birmingham News, where some of his photos made the front page. During this time, he began to think about the mysteries of image. Why was one picture so compelling and memorable while another, very similar, was not? What accounted for the difference? "It is often an enigma," he says, "and I am still trying to understand it."

He enrolled in journalism at the University of Alabama, and earned enough money photographing student events to buy a Speed Graphic. After freshman year, he moved to New York and entered Columbia University, graduating in 1956 with a BA in physics. His first job was as an electronic engineer at ITT Labs, but he soon joined the physics department at Columbia, designing electronics for experiments that probed the microcosm, capturing the paths of elementary particles. LeCroy's instruments were widely used at Columbia and elsewhere in the scientific world.

After seven years at Columbia's Nevis Laboratories, he started his own company in 1963. The LeCroy Corporation, now listed on NASDAQ, is a leader in the design and manufacture of high quality electronic measuring instruments such as digital oscilloscopes. Today, LeCroy is chairman emeritus of the Chestnut Ridge, New York company.

Throughout his career, LeCroy continued to make photographs, but without a specific goal until a new method - digital imaging - began to develop a few years ago. He quickly realized that digital representation and processing, along with advances in printing technology, put new and exciting powers into the hands of photographers.

One newly accessible subject is what LeCroy calls, "the world of the small" - above the microscopic, but just below what is clearly visible to us in daily life. "It is the beauty of detail we do not otherwise see," he says, "the hidden designs in a single petal of a flower, in wood, or bit of thread." Photographed digitally, then printed much larger than life, ordinary objects become almost magical in the form and textures they reveal. "This dimension of life has been there all the time beneath the veil of our senses, so close to us and yet so foreign it seems to exist in another world. Now, at last, we can explore it."