Made in Vermont

The Illusionist

By Diane E. Foulds, Photograph by Daria Bishop

Something about the image stops you in your tracks. Maybe it’s her eyes radiating through you in indigo blue, or the emotions they conceal. There’s an ethereal quality to it, a ghostly luminosity that is strangely three-dimensional. Stroll by and the picture seems to shift in perspective, then vanish altogether.

The magic is the medium: The royal portrait of Queen Elizabeth II is a hologram — a first for the British royal family, and a crowning achievement for Burlington entrepreneur John Perry, one of the world’s leading producers of these mysterious, laser-based images.

Perry is a master illusionist, and his company, Holographics North Inc., of Burlington, creates photographic alchemy from a laboratory of lasers, chemicals and computer gadgetry.

His spectral manifestations seem to let the viewer roam outer space, time-travel through human existence or glimpse the interiors of the human body. The technology is used in medicine, physics, historical preservation and art exhibits, and we see them daily on credit cards and currency, where their kaleidoscopic flashes make forgery difficult. Perry, 63, has mounted his incandescent images in museums, trade shows and corporate headquarters. He has installed them onto cruise ships, where their movement eases the claustrophobia of cramped spaces. Reactions range from fascination to stupefaction.

“The light, you might say, has a quality different from any other light around you,” Perry says. “Its effect on everyone is quite powerful.”

For the Queen’s likeness, made in 2004, Buckingham Palace chose London artist Chris Levine. His plan was to place the monarch on a turntable and film her as she circled slowly around, but the thought of the queen on a lazy Susan didn’t seem quite right. Instead, Levine, using a system designed by London holographic artist Rob Munday, slid a camera down a track in front of her, snapping the 200 frames necessary for the holographic process. Then, he turned to Perry to transform the stills into a moving, 3-D image.

The Queen’s face hardly changes when you move in front of it, Perry explains, because she was told to be absolutely still during the six or eight seconds of shooting. “She is very good at that, so there is no apparent movement.”

In contrast, Perry’s other work teems with animation. There’s the moon drifting calmly around a spinning earth, a Tyrannosaurus rex swaying its gnarly head, a dancing woman shrinking down to a dancing skeleton, and the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft gliding on its mission to Saturn. The largest images are the size of a door, their subjects hovering in midair like a hummingbird or springing into action the moment you move. Yet the trick boils down to little more than plastic film and a light bulb.

“The image moves when you move,” he points out with a magician’s smile, “but the only moving part is you.”

Born in Boston and raised in Cambridge, Mass., Perry took an early interest in the properties of light and space. He studied physics as an undergrad at Pomona College near Los Angeles, then earned a Ph.D. in astrophysics. He was teaching photography and astronomy at the University of Vermont in the early 1980s when holograms were gaining in popularity, so he invited two Canadian artists to give hologram workshops at the university’s Living/Learning Center. Intrigued, he studied with them for a few weeks in Toronto, then returned to UVM to teach a hologram course for the next four years.

In 1985 he opened a hologram lab, streamlining the process down to himself and a few part-time assistants.

“It took about 10 years to get the bugs out,” Perry says, opening the door to a dark, concrete-floored room where the film is laid out for development. Vibration is his biggest enemy, as the patterns formed by the light waves are microscopic. A single passing truck can ruin an image; he often sets the system to run overnight, when the streets are quietest.

Panes of hologram-coated Plexiglas hang throughout his honeycombed office on the ground floor of the former Adams School, each one invisible until you lean into its field of vision. In the 26 years that he has worked with it, hologram technology has undergone radical changes. The earliest holograms, glaring sheens of rainbow hues, bordered on kitsch. Today they can be produced in any number of colors, a single color, or black and white.

Perry has introduced lighting innovations, expanded the depth of image and enlarged size capability to six feet. Prices range from $600 for a basic stock item to about $21,000 for a maximum-sized, three-color production with all the bells and whistles. His clientele has changed, too. Initially, most work was commercial, but today fine art dominates. Perry has collaborated with more than 40 international artists, including Frank Stella, Setsuko Ishii and James Turrell.

Perry’s own gratification comes with the first look he gets at a new hologram, fresh out of the darkroom, and the craftsmanship his work entails.

“This is not to imply that every hologram is great,” he hastens to add, “but many are. You really don’t know what you’ve got until the film is dried, hung and lit correctly. When it is, the image jumps right out at you.”

“This is still one-at-a-time hand production, and I’m very proud of that. It doesn’t translate to mass production at this scale. I see that as a great thing.”

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Holography at a glance

• Holography is a method of recording or reproducing a three-dimensional image.
• It was invented in 1947 by Hungarian physicist Dennis Gabor, who won a 1971 Nobel Prize for his work.
• Some holograms require laser light to reproduce the image; others may be viewed in regular white light.

— Source: www.britannica.com