A Photographer vs. the Lasers

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Humans have gazed upon the stars for millennia, contemplating our insignificance under infinite vastness. Staring at the night sky is humbling and joyous - unless you're living on the streets. Then it can be downright terrifying.

In 2 001, the photographer Robert Shults was homeless, in Austin, Tex. He took shelter under whatever enclosure or overpass he could find, unsettled by his stellar view of the heavens. Elsewhere in town, a team of scientists was working on a project that would give them answers to some major questions about what was going on up there, millions of miles away.

What were they building? The world's most powerful laser. It fired up for the first time several years later, in 2008, and, improbably, became the subject for Mr. Shults's 2009 film-noir-meets-sci-fi photo series, “The Superlative Light.” He had become enraptured by the laboratory and its laser, and determined to share his fascination with the outside world.

“I saw myself as this proxy for every other layperson who can't be here,” he said. “It was evident right away that this was almost hallowed ground. It was a very rarefied place that, beyond the scientists, very few people get in to see.”

This 1,000-trillion-watt behemoth is at the Petawatt Laser lab at the University of Texas. It derives unimaginable power from the manipulation of light waves and the compression of relatively small amounts of energy into impossibly short periods of time. It is used for experiments ranging from attempts to generate nuclear fusion, to recreations of supernovae that mark the death of stars. The scientists fire the laser to catalyze reactions, but also use it as a strobe light to photograph microscopic events occurring over a nearly incomprehensible time-span: one-10th of a trillionth of a second.

“All the power plants in the United States produce about one-half trillion watts,” said  Todd Ditmire, director of the Center for High Energy Density Science, which runs the lab. “Which means, f or an ephemeral instant, this laser produces 2,000 times the power of all the power plants in the United States.”

Robert Shults

Compared with that, Mr. Shults's journey to this lab and laser was a seemingly unending ordeal. Though he had successfully navigated the jungles of Guatemala in earlier adventures, he was no match for a couple of well-trained Everglades con men who robbed him while he was traveling through Florida. One minute, he was offering directions to a stranger, the next, his cameras and negatives were gone. All he had left was a bag of clothes inside a flimsy tent.

Desperate, he headed to Fort Lauderdale, and took a bad job selling coupon books. How bad was it? “I remember coming home from tarring roofs in South Florida with bits of roc k that comes off of shingles embedded in the side of my head,” he said. “And that was better than the job I got.”

The company transferred him to Texas, but that didn't work out so well either.

“I was down to two or three hundred bucks, and essentially no possessions, besides a couple of changes of clothes,” he said. “I remember thinking, ‘I don't know that I want to hit rock bottom in Dallas. It doesn't seem like a very forgiving place to land.' I didn't really know anything about Austin at the time, but I remember thinking ‘Austin seems like it might be a softer landing.'”

Soon after, his money gone, he was homeless on the streets of Austin.

Fortunately, he found employment and a home by the end of the summer of 2001, just before the world fell apart for the rest of us. Eventually, he was hired to teach photographic workshops at U.T., and became friendly with Gilliss Dyer, a research associate at the Petawatt Laser lab. Mr. Shults, a lifelong lover of science in general, and physics in particular, persuaded Dr. Dyer to give him a tour of the lab, and was hooked immediately.

Robert Shults

“It was the most mysterious place I'd ever seen,” Mr. Shults said. “I had to convince everyone else that I wouldn't be in the way and I wouldn't break anything.”

Thus “The Superlative Light” was born.

Shockingly, he discovered that the amount of energy input into the apparatus is no greater than what is found in a simple cup of coffee. The scientists fire the laser for just  one-10th of a trillionth of a second.

“The time duration of the light pulse is the same fraction of one minute that a minute is a fraction of the age of the universe,” Dr. Ditmire said. (Don't think a bout that too hard, or your brain might melt.)

Mr. Shults quickly found that the lab's difficult shooting conditions made certain choices for him. Fear of burning out his retinas led him to work with a range-finder camera, so he wasn't looking directly through the lens. Fear of burning out a digital camera's C.C.D. led him to shoot analog. Wildly fluctuating lighting conditions led him to choose 1600 ASA film. And a love of grainy, noirish '50s sci-fi films made the choice of black-and-white film a no-brainer. (Some sample titles from his large collection: “Attack of the Giant Leeches,” “The Crawling Eye” and “The Brain that Wouldn't Die.”)

The dynamic photographs offer the viewer a glimpse behind a very expensive curtain. With their jarring compositions and striking use of deep blac ks and evanescent whites, the pictures are strange and evocative. While it's counterintuitive to see a story about a laser that doesn't allow for color, the aesthetic casts the scientists as heroes out of a B-movie, which Mr. Shults intended. (The laser's beams are not actually observable to the human eye anyway, since it emits infrared light. As Dr. Ditmire put it: “It's too red. More red than red. So red you can't see them.”)

The photographs work on several levels. They are documents, of course, but also resonate emotionally. The mood is meant to project uncertainty, and makes the viewer feel uncomfortable. In this regard, Mr. Shults sees the project as a metaphor for the fear of science that exists within some communities in the United States at present. Defiant, the pictures celebrate the people who toil each day to harness the power of the gods.

The experiments have confirmed that when stars die, the resulting debris forms clumps, which become the founda tion for new stars, like a mythical phoenix in the heavens. It's a gripping reminder that the cycle of life applies to everything in the universe, including Robert Shults, who had to crash before he could ascend and fulfill his childhood dreams. He fell hard, picked himself up again, and ended up on top. Literally. He now lives in a beautiful, high-rise building that overlooks the park where he used to hang out in his homeless days, waiting for a free meal at the mobile soup kitchen.

“If this was a movie script,” he said, “it would be derided as implausible.”

Robert Shults

Jonathan Blaustein is an artist and writer based in New Mexico. He contributes regularly to the blog A Photo Editor, and two of his photo projects have been shown on Lens: “The Value of a Dollar” in 2010 and “MINE” in 2012. Follow him - @jblauphoto - and @nytimesphoto in Twitter.