Eadweard Muybridge
An eccentric British photographic artist with a seemingly unpronounceable name became a household word in 1878. After six years of experimentation, Eadweard Muybridge (1830 to 1904) demonstrated that all four hooves of a horse momentarily leave the ground at a full gallop. With 50 cameras all armed with electrically triggered shutters, Muybridge introduced stop motion photography to a skeptical nineteenth century. California Governor Leland Stanford underwrote the “flying horse” demonstration, which took place in Palo Alto, California.
Before the famous galloping horse, Muybridge (pronounced Edward My-bridge) spent nine years chronicling historical events and scenes in the western United States. In 1867 and again in 1872, under the pseudonym Helios, he photographed the wilds of Yosemite Valley and its indigenous Indian tribes. By 1873 his keen eye for design and drama was turned to the construction of the Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads. That same year Muybridge covered the last Indian war, the conflict between the Modoc Indians and the U.S. Army. In 1868 Alaska was his beat, Central America in 1875 and California mining scenes in 1876.
Some of his most useful photographs were taken from the hills overlooking San Francisco and at street level in 1878. At regular intervals throughout April, Muybridge snapped clear, bright, well-focused panoramic photos of San Francisco buildings and neighborhoods. These photos, re-shot after fire destroyed similar photos he had taken in 1877, are cited as some of the best examples of what the city looked like before the 1906 earthquake and fire.
Artist Thomas Eakins, who encouraged his students to draw the nude human form, arranged for Muybridge to conduct further locomotion experiments at the University of Pennsylvania. For three years, beginning in 1883, Muybridge, now using more sophisticated lenses, shutters and emulsions, photographed farm and zoo animals as well as humans in a vast array of movements. Many of the human studies, including some in which Muybridge participated, were conducted in the nude. Sequences ranged from walking down a staircase to “throwing self in a heap of hay.” In 1887 Animal Locomotion, an 11-volume magnum opus containing 781 large folio collotype prints, was published. Few copies sold. Today single page original prints from Animal Locomotion retail for $600 to $1,600.
Besides his books and pages from his books, other examples of Muybridge’s work are available. Many photos from his various expeditions were later published as stereographs by Bradley and Rulofson and sold as novelties. Over 2,000 Muybridge images of his California trips and his locomotion studies were also made into Magic Lantern slides.
Muybridge experimented with re-animating his stop action photos. He developed a mechanical variation on a zoetrope, the child’s toy that resembled a colander on a stick with slits instead of holes. Inside was a strip with drawings that moved in a quick repetitive sequence when the colander was spun. Movement was perceived when the pictures were viewed through the slits. Muybridge called his more complex invention the zoopraxiscope and he not only developed a mechanism to project the stop action pictures on a screen, but also the special discs that approximated the strips for the zoetrope. The zoopraxiscope, first demonstrated for Leland Sanford in 1879, was one of the first moving picture devices. All zoopraxiscope discs known to exist are in the Royal Kingston Museum in Kingston Upon Thames, Muybridge’s birth city.
After Muybridge returned to Kingston Upon Thames in 1894, he published two shorter versions of his 1887 classic, Animals in Motion (1899) and The Human Figure in Motion (1901). The two volumes contained 400 of the 781 sequences in Animal Locomotion. Muybridge was not involved in the publication of The Horse in Motion as Shown by Instantaneous Photography (Osgood & Co., 1882), a text underwritten by Stanford that minimized the photographic artist’s contribution to the galloping horse experiments.
Reference note by p4A Contributing Editor Pete Prunkl.