Leon D. Harmon

Leon Harmon was born in 1922 and grew up on a farm in eastern New York. He started his career as a radio serviceman and electronics hobbyist before moving into some of the most formative spaces of early computing. In 1950, he joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, working as a wireman on one of the first digital computers. There, he encountered figures like John von Neumann and Albert Einstein while quietly pursuing night classes in engineering at NYU. By the mid-1950s, Harmon shifted his focus to human perception and machine vision, joining Bell Laboratories in 1956. His work there would come to define much of what we now call computer graphics and computational imaging.

At Bell Labs, Harmon collaborated with Kenneth Knowlton to pioneer computer-generated art. They developed techniques to convert photographs into compositions of typographic symbols and patterns, experimenting with the limits of human perception. Their groundbreaking work includes Studies in Perception I, a large-scale print of a reclining nude made from discrete grayscale levels represented by symbols, created using an IBM 7094 computer. This work was featured in The New York Times in 1967 and exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1968. Harmon is also recognized for his pixelated portrait of Abraham Lincoln, which inspired Salvador Dalí’s Dalívision series. Later in his career, Harmon moved into biomedical engineering at Case Western Reserve University, where he continued research on facial recognition and robotic control.

Harmon’s work has had a lasting impact on the art and technology worlds. His collaborations at Bell Labs helped establish computer art as a legitimate creative practice and bridged the gap between scientific research and visual expression. His contributions have been recognized in major exhibitions and retrospectives, including the Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT) initiative, which fostered collaboration between artists and engineers. Today, his legacy is preserved through museum collections and ongoing discussions about the intersections of perception, computation, and creativity. Harmon passed away in 1982.