J. R. Eyerman

[6]Among his most famous photographs is the oft-reproduced long-shot of movie audience members all wearing 3-D glasses while watching the premiere of Bwana Devil in Hollywood in November 1952.

[5][1] Such visual repetition was a favorite device; another example is Eyerman's expansive aerial shot for Life of multiple moving vans simultaneously emptying furniture into newly built houses on a Lakeview suburban street that stretches to the horizon, while his picture of a receding crowd of engineers at their drafting tables in a vast office space was selected by curator Edward Steichen for the world-touring Museum of Modern Art exhibition The Family of Man that was seen by 9 million visitors.

[11] After opening his own structural engineering firm in Seattle, he developed new tools to photograph in difficult situations.

In his 1957 book, author Stanley Rayfield noted that Eyerman's technical innovations have helped push back the frontiers of photography.

He perfected an electric eye mechanism to trip the shutters of nine cameras to make pictures of an atomic blast [at Yucca Flat, Nevada, in 1952]; devised [with Otis Barton] a special camera for taking pictures 3600 feet beneath the surface of the ocean; successfully "speeded up" color film to make previously impossible color pictures of the shimmering, changing forms and patterns of the aurora borealis.