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Jules Aarons retrospective celebrates a career focused on two fields of view

By David J. Craig

For more than 30 years, Jules Aarons observed how radio waves behave when they pass through the earth's atmosphere. His efforts led to important advances in satellite and global positioning technology and made him a pioneer in applied space physics.

	Jules Aarons, a CAS research professor of astronomy and an accomplished photographer, is the subject of a career retrospective at the College of Arts and Sciences on Friday, October 19. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky

Amazingly, at the peak of his career as a scientist, Aarons (GRS'49), a CAS research professor of astronomy, who turned 80 on October 3, also found time to make startling observations of his more immediate surroundings, producing photographs that are among the most candid and accomplished in American street photography.

Aarons' friends and colleagues will help him celebrate his scientific and artistic achievements with a career retrospective on Friday, October 19, from 3:30 to 5 p.m. in Room 522 of the College of Arts and Sciences. Sunanda Basu, program director for aeronomy at the National Science Foundation in Washington, D.C., will discuss Aarons' contributions to science. Sinclair Hitchings, keeper of prints at the Boston Public Library, will speak about his photography.

"Aarons' dual career is even more incredible when you consider that within space science he made a double contribution -- important discoveries in ionospheric physics, which had applications for national defense, and in fundamental research," says Michael Mendillo, a CAS astronomy professor and a longtime friend and colleague. "He's also a joy to work with -- wonderfully warm and personable, and always with words of encouragement for colleagues and students."

Space scientist
In the 1950s, as the United States and the Soviet Union raced to send satellites into space, Aarons was among a group of scientists at the U.S. Air Force Geophysics Research Laboratory at Hanscom Air Force Base in Bedford, Mass., who began studying how radio transmissions from satellites were disrupted on their way to earth when they passed through the atmosphere. Aarons, a former Air Force radio and radar officer, who earned a master's degree in physics from BU in 1949 and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Paris in 1954, soon became the Air Force's leading expert on the issue.

Aarons discovered how radio waves were disrupted by the ionosphere, the upper regions of the earth's atmosphere, most dramatically in regions near the earth's magnetic field, such as in the vicinity of the north and south poles, and near the equator. He also discovered how radio waves could be made less susceptible to such problems by increasing the frequency of radio transmissions. His work helped make satellite communications more reliable and contributed to the global positioning system now used by the military and as navigational tools in airplanes, boats, and luxury automobiles.
Later, at BU, where he has been a CAS research professor of astronomy since 1981, Aarons turned exclusively to basic research, using data about radio wave disruptions to understand the nature of the ionosphere.

On the slide, North End, circa 1950.

But his accomplishments as a scientist were not limited to his own research. Basu, a space physicist originally from India, says that Aarons created an international community of scientists interested in radio wave propagation by forming NATO's Joint Satellites Studies Group in 1960, securing Air Force funding for several international studies, sending equipment for observing radio waves to researchers in other nations, and inviting foreign researchers to work in his laboratory.

The center of that activity now is the International Beacon Satellites Study Group, which grew out of the Joint Satellites Studies Group in 1983.
"Dr. Aarons has provided support for many people," says Basu, who worked on a project sponsored by Aarons' Air Force department in the 1960s, and after coming to the United States, worked directly with him between 1975 and 1981. "When I was in India, he gave me opportunities that kept my career going, writing letters for me, and getting awards for my research team. He's a very caring, humane person, and the Beacon Group has a very warm atmosphere, almost like a family."

Lost Boston
For as long as he can remember, Aarons says, he has felt a creative impulse that science did not satisfy. While working for the Air Force in the late 1940s, he found his voice. Influenced by French street photographers such as Edouard Boubat and Eugene Atget, and their American counterparts, including Sid Grossman and Lisette Model, Aarons began shooting scenes of everyday life on the streets of Boston's North End and West End.

Developing and printing his own photographs, the self-taught Aarons' intimate portraits of strangers are remarkable, critics have written, for their wit, classical sense of design, and technical precision, but also for the fact that his subjects rarely seem to know they are being photographed.

"What I contributed to street photography that is somewhat unique is that I used a twin-lens Rolleiflex, which allowed me to photograph without intruding on the scene," says Aarons. The camera has a waist-level viewfinder so the photographer can focus and snap a picture without ever holding the camera at eye level and thus alerting the subject. "I always was interested in unguarded moments," he says. "I think that spirit is in my photos."

Aarons' photos have been exhibited in one-man shows in Boston, New York, and Paris. He stopped shooting photos in 1981 because of sensitivity to darkroom chemicals.

What is most enduring about the photos, the BPL's Hitchings says, is the "deep human sympathy" they demonstrate. "When I look at Aarons' photos," he says, "I see a profound ability to identify with other people. It is that which makes the photos memorable."

Aarons' Boston photos, for which he is best known, also are important as cultural documentation of the city's poor, mostly immigrant West End neighborhoods, which were demolished as part of the oft-criticized slum-clearance schemes of the 1950s.

"The West End was a slum in the most interesting sense of the word, and there is little that memorializes it," says Hitchings. "When we at the library met Aarons, we thought his work was too good to be true. It offers insights into the human side of the West End that had been impossible for the past 50 years."

The Boston Public Library, which has purchased much of Aarons' work and exhibited his Boston photos in 1999, is planning a fall 2002 exhibition of photographs Aarons took in Provincetown beginning in 1949.

	The onlookers, North End, circa 1950.

Aarons says he does not regret having divided his energy between science and photography. A full-time job outside of photography enabled him to concentrate solely on the artistic merit of his work, and to never consider shooting pictures that he thought would earn money.

"To be sucessful at an art you have to be devoted, and I always took photos with a purpose," he says. "If I was traveling and I could get a few hours for myself, I wasn't going to do shopping or go to a museum. I just went out to photograph."

The Aarons retrospective is sponsored by BU's Center for Space Physics and the CAS department of astronomy. For more information, call 353-5990.

19 October 2001
Boston University
Office of University Relations