File:Dali-midsummers-night-mare.jpg

Salvador Dali and Philippe Halsman collaborated on this photo, "Midsummer Night's Mare". According to the Fall 1950 issue of Photography Workshop:

As the climax to Dali-Halsman experimentation, the artist and photographer met under a eucalyptus tree outside Los Angeles and produced the extravaganza printed here. The picture which Halsman calls "Dali's Midsummer Night's Mare was made with the help of a rented crane, a company of riggers, and especially built $25,000 strobe outfit. The photograph, which required the use of three make and three female models, borrowed sheep, tables, chairs, oranges, water and fire, took one full day to set up and was photographed after dark. The production shots [also in the magazine] shows Dali's assistants at work.

The strobe units, which had an output of some 25,000 watts, created a light impulse that lasted 1/350th of a second instead of the usual brief 1/10,000th to 1/1000th of a second. The length of the light spark accounts for the slight motion in come moving images.

Dali at first insisted on one additional moving image. convinced that nothing make a more interesting mass in the picture than falling wet cement, he wanted a hodful hoisted tree-high and flung, as the shutter clicked, at a girl model. "I said no," Halsman said. "She was a nice girl just as she was -- uncrystallized. Dali was most unhappy."