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Jack Kilby - Meadows Museum, Dallas
  • Episode: -
  • Brand: -
  • Category: Art
 

1- Jack Kilby (1923-2005), Big Rig (ca. 1970), Kilby negative, modern inkjet carbon-pigment print by Gary McCoy, 16 x 20 inches
2- Jack Kilby, Main Place (1970), gelatin silver print, 16 x 20 inches
3- Jack Kilby, Alfred (ca. 1970), Kilby negative, modern inkjet carbon-pigment print by Gary McCoy, 16 x 20 inches
4- Jack Kilby, Construction Overpass (ca. 1966), gelatin silver print, 16 x 20 inches
5- Squire Haskins photo, Jack Kilby and the Integrated Circuit (ca. 1960), gelatin silver print, 8 x 10 inches


All images: Jack Kilby Photograph Collection
DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University

Exactly 50 years ago, Jack Kilby (1923-2005) introduced a group of Texas Instruments engineers to his prototype for the first integrated circuit microchip, which ushered in the electronic era. Without Kilby's invention, and the miniaturization of calculators it enabled (incidentally Kilby produced the first portable calculator in 1967) you wouldn't be reading these lines - personal computers wouldn't exist. Man wouldn't have walked on the Moon either.

Parallel to his brilliant engineering career, during which he held 60 patents and was eventually awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics, the humble genius entertained a mistress: photography. Wandering with his Hasselblad, he captured, always in black and white,  street scenes, landscapes, a lot of architecture and workshop scenes, a few portraits. His pictures exhibit the meticulousness and the sense of composition that characterize a fine electronics specialist, as well as a taste for abstract structures delineated by metal and stone, and an eye trained to  detect the beauty of visual repetition and serial products. Kilby will live ever after as one of the founding fathers of the electronic age, but the exhibition at the Meadows Museum reveals a nuanced sensitivity, a sense of humor and an engaging perspective on the world. All analogic qualities?

 

Jack Kilby - The Eye of Genius

Photographs by the Inventor of the Microchip

July 12 through September 21, 08

Meadows Museum, Southern Methodist University, Dallas

Exhibition's page on www.smu.edu