LIFE Magazine's Classic Photos

Pablo Picasso, 1949
By Gjon Mili
The Albanian native Gjon Mili immigrated to America to study electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After working at Westinghouse on photographic applications of lighting techniques, he met in 1937 with M.I.T.'s Harold Edgerton, who had developed stroboscopic light. Mili experimented with the process, and his dazzling pictures in LIFE became famous. His portrait of the painter Picasso sketching with a penlight at the Madoura Pottery workshop in Vallauris, France, is a masterwork.

• The Book, "Life, the Classic Collection"