Eadweard Muybridge
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| + | "Here the work of [[Eadweard Muybridge |Muybridge]] sets in. He had a black [[horse]] trot or gallop or walk before a white wall, passing twenty-four cameras. On the path of the horse were twenty-four [[thread]]s which the horse broke one after another and each one released the spring which opened the shutter of an instrument. The movement of the horse was thus analyzed into twenty-four pictures of successive phases; and for the first time the human eye saw the actual positions of a horse's legs during the gallop or trot. It is not surprising that these pictures of Muybridge interested the French painters when he came to Paris, but fascinated still more the great student of animal movements, the physiologist [[Marey]]. He had contributed to science many an intricate apparatus for the registration of movement processes. "Marey's tambour" is still the most useful instrument in every physiological and psychological laboratory, whenever slight delicate movements are to be recorded. The movement of a bird's wings interested him especially, and at his suggestion Muybridge turned to the study of the flight of birds. Flying pigeons were photographed in different positions, each picture taken in a five-hundredth part of a second." --''[[The Photoplay]]'' (1916) by Hugo Münsterberg | ||
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| + | "Male and female models, nude and clothed, were photographed in all manner of activity - walking, running, laying bricks, climbing stairs, fencing, jumping. [[Eadweard Muybridge|Muybridge]] even photographed [[Woman. A Shock to the Nervous System |one girl throwing a bucket of water over another girl’s shoulders]], and a [[Spanking a Child|mother spanking a child]]. His specific intention was to create an atlas for the use of artists, a visual dictionary of human and animal forms in action.” —''[[The History of Photography: From 1839 to the Present]]'', [[Beaumont Newhall]], 1964. | ||
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| + | In 1887 the [[University of Pennsylvania]] published 781 of [[Eadweard Muybridge|his]] photographic plates under the title of ''[[Animal Locomotion]]''. "What has made these plates appealing to a general, and certainly a more [[prurient]], audience ever since is that they are not limited to animal locomotion but they also depict human beings. The human figures are generally unclothed, with 133 sets of plates showing fully nude males photographed from the front, rear, and side. The most homoerotic of these plates are those numbered 345-348, which show two good-looking young men wrestling. In style, they are remarkably similar to the Los Angeles-based [[Athletic Model Guild]] in the 1950s and 1960s — provocative and arousing, and more explicit that their later counterparts." --cited in ''[[Silent Topics: Essays on Undocumented Areas of Silent Film]]'' (2005) by Anthony Slide | ||
| + | <hr> | ||
| + | Photos such as [[Woman Pouring a Bucket of Water on Other Woman]] and [[Spanking a Child]] have led art historian [[Marta Braun]] to claim that | ||
| + | [[Eadweard Muybridge]] perhaps sought [[prurience]] next to [[scientific inquiry]] when he made the ''Animal Locomotion'' set. | ||
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| + | Braun argues in ''[[Picturing Time: The Work of Étienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904)]]'' that many of Muybridge's sequences of women show them engaged in "particularly awkward and ungainly actions and what were, at that time, certainly forbidden activities." She goes on in that same book by saying that "the photographs objectify erotic impulses and extend voyeuristic curiosity in language we now recognise as taken from the standard pornographic vocabulary." | ||
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| - | '''Eadweard Muybridge''' ([[April 9]], [[1830]] – [[May 8]], [[1904]]) was an [[England|English]]-born [[List of photographers|photographer]], known primarily for his early use of multiple [[camera]]s to capture [[motion (physics)|motion]], and his [[zoopraxiscope]], a device for projecting [[motion pictures]] that pre-dated [[celluloid]] film strip still used today. | ||
| - | == Stanford and the trot question == | ||
| - | *[[Stanford and the trot question]] | ||
| - | In [[1872]], former [[Governor of California]] [[Leland Stanford]], a businessman and [[Horse racing|race-horse]] owner, had taken a position on a popularly-debated question of the day: whether during a horse's [[Trot (horse gait)|trot]], all four hooves were ever off the ground at the same time. Stanford sided with this assertion, called "unsupported transit", and took it upon himself to prove it scientifically. (Though legend also includes a wager of up to $25,000, there is no evidence of this.) Stanford sought out Muybridge and hired him to settle the question. | ||
| - | Muybridge's relationship with Stanford was long and torrid, and it would ultimately prove to be his entrance and exit from the history books. | + | '''Eadweard James Muybridge''' (9 April 1830 – 8 May 1904) was an [[English photographer]] important for his pioneering work in photographic studies of [[motion (physics)|motion]] and in [[motion-picture]] projection. He adopted the name Eadweard Muybridge, believing it to be the original Anglo-Saxon form of his name. He immigrated to the [[United States]] as a young man but remained obscure until 1868, when his large photographs of Yosemite Valley, California, made him world famous. Muybridge is known for his pioneering work on [[animal locomotion]] in 1877 and 1878, which used multiple cameras to capture [[motion (physics)|motion]] in stop-action photographs, and his [[zoopraxiscope]], a device for projecting [[motion pictures]] that pre-dated the flexible perforated film strip used in [[cinematography]]. |
| - | To prove Stanford's claim, Muybridge developed a scheme for instantaneous motion picture capture. Muybridge's [[technology]] involved chemical formulas for [[photographic processing]] and an electrical trigger created by the chief engineer for the [[Southern Pacific Railroad]], John D. Isaacs. It is important to underscore Muybridge's collboration with John D. Isaacs. The design for the trigger to set off each camera was what eluded Muybridge for so long and without Isaacs' help, Muybridge's contraption would never have come into existence. | + | In his earlier years in [[San Francisco]], Muybridge had become known for his [[landscape photography]], particularly of the [[Yosemite Valley]]. He also photographed the [[Tlingit people]] in [[Alaska]], and was commissioned by the United States Army to photograph the [[Modoc War]] in 1873. In 1874 he shot and killed Major Harry Larkyns, his wife's lover, and was acquitted in a jury trial on the grounds of [[justifiable homicide]]. He travelled for more than a year in Central America on a photographic expedition in 1875. |
| - | In 1877, Muybridge settled Stanford's question with a single photographic negative showing Stanford's racehorse ''Occident'' airborne during trot. This negative has not survived, although woodcuts made of it did. | + | In the 1880s, Muybridge entered a very productive period at the [[University of Pennsylvania]] in [[Philadelphia]], producing over 100,000 images of animals and humans in motion, capturing what the human eye could not distinguish as separate movements. He spent much of his later years giving public lectures and demonstrations of his photography and early motion picture sequences. He also edited and published compilations of his work, which greatly influenced [[visual artist]]s and the developing fields of scientific and industrial photography. |
| + | == Legacy and representation in other media == | ||
| - | By 1878, spurred on by Stanford to expand the experiment, Muybridge had successfully photographed a horse in fast motion using a series of twenty-four cameras. The cameras were arranged along a track parallel to the horse's, and each of the camera shutters was controlled by a trip wire which was triggered by the horse's hooves. | + | Many of Muybridge's photographic sequences have been published since the 1950s as artists' reference books. [[Animated cartoon|Cartoon]] [[animator]]s often use Muybridge's photos as a reference when drawing their characters in motion. Since 1991, the company Optical Toys has published Muybridge sequences in the form of movie [[flipbook]]s. |
| - | This series of photos, taken at what is now [[Stanford University]], is called ''The Horse in Motion'', and shows that the hooves all leave the ground — although not with the legs fully extended forward and back, as contemporary illustrators tended to imagine, but rather at the moment when all the hooves are tucked ''under'' the horse, as it switches from "pulling" from the front legs to "pushing" from the back legs. | + | The filmmaker [[Thom Andersen]] made a 1974 documentary titled ''[[Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer]]'', describing his life and work. |
| - | The relationship between the mercurial Muybridge and his patron broke down in 1882 when Stanford commissioned a book called ''The Horse in Motion as Shown by Instantaneous Photography'' which omitted actual photographs by Muybridge, relying instead on drawings and engravings based on the photographs, and which gave Muybridge scant credit for his work. | + | The composer [[Philip Glass]]'s opera ''[[The Photographer]]'' (1982) is based on Muybridge's murder trial, with a [[libretto]] including text from the court transcript. A promotional music video featured an excerpt of the opera and numerous Muybridge images. |
| - | The lack of photographs was likely simply due to the printing constraints of the time but Muybridge took it as a slap in the face and filed an unsuccessful law suit against Stanford. | + | The play ''Studies in Motion: The Hauntings of Eadweard Muybridge'' (2006) was a co-production between Vancouver's Electric Company Theatre and the University of British Columbia Theatre. While blending fiction with fact, it conveys Muybridge's obsession with cataloguing animal motion. The production started touring in 2010. |
| - | == See also == | + | The Canadian poet [[Rob Winger]] wrote ''Muybridge's Horse: A Poem in Three Phases'' (2007). The long poem won the [[CBC Literary Award for Poetry]] and was nominated for the [[Governor General's Award]] for Literature, the [[Trillium Book Award]] for Poetry, and the [[Ottawa Book Award]]. It expressed his life and obsessions in a 'poetic-photographic' style. |
| + | In 1985, the [[music video]] for [[Larry Gowan]]'s single "(You're a) Strange Animal" prominently featured animation [[rotoscope]]d from Muybridge's work. In 1986, a galloping horse sequence was used in the background of the [[John Farnham]] music video for the song "[[Pressure Down]]". In 1993, the rock band [[U2]] made a video of their song "[[Lemon (song)|Lemon]]" into a tribute to Muybridge's techniques. In 2004, the electronic music group [[The Crystal Method]] made a music video to their song "Born Too Slow", which was based on Muybridge's work, including a man walking in front of a background grid. | ||
| + | |||
| + | [[Kingston University]]'s ''Eadweard Muybridge Building'' is named in honour of Muybridge, who was born in nearby Kingston upon Thames, England. | ||
| + | |||
| + | His work has influenced the following: | ||
| + | |||
| + | *[[Étienne-Jules Marey]] — recorded the first series of live action photos with a single camera by a method of [[chronophotography]] | ||
| + | *[[Thomas Eakins]] — American artist who worked with and continued Muybridge's motion studies, and incorporated the findings into his own artwork | ||
| + | *[[W.K. Dickson|William Dickson]] — credited as inventor of the [[motion picture camera]] | ||
| + | *[[Thomas Edison]] — developed and owned patents for motion picture cameras | ||
| + | *[[Marcel Duchamp]] — artist, painted ''[[Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2]]'' (1912) | ||
| + | *[[Harold Eugene Edgerton]] — pioneered [[stroboscope|stroboscopic]] and [[high speed photography]] and film, producing an [[Academy Award|Oscar]]-winning short movie and many striking photographic sequences | ||
| + | *[[Francis Bacon (artist)|Francis Bacon]] — artist who made numerous paintings from photographs by Muybridge | ||
| + | *[[John Gaeta]] — used the principles of Muybridge's photography to create the [[bullet time]] slow-motion technique of the 1999 movie ''[[The Matrix]]''. | ||
| + | *[[Steven Pippin]] — so-called [[Young British Artist]] who converted a row of [[laundromat]] washing machines into sequential cameras in the style of Muybridge | ||
| + | |||
| + | On 9 April 2012, the 182nd birthday of Muybridge, [[Google]] honored him in a [[Google Doodle]] with an animation based on the photographs of the "horse in motion." | ||
| + | ==List of photos== | ||
| + | *[[Animal Locomotion]] (1887) | ||
| + | |||
| + | == See also == | ||
| + | *[[Stanford and the trot question]] | ||
| * [[Media arts]] | * [[Media arts]] | ||
| * [[Precursors of film]] | * [[Precursors of film]] | ||
| + | *[[Pretexts for prurience in art]] | ||
| + | *[[Animated sequence of a buffalo (American bison) galloping]] | ||
| {{GFDL}} | {{GFDL}} | ||
| + | [[Category:canon]] | ||
Current revision
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"Here the work of Muybridge sets in. He had a black horse trot or gallop or walk before a white wall, passing twenty-four cameras. On the path of the horse were twenty-four threads which the horse broke one after another and each one released the spring which opened the shutter of an instrument. The movement of the horse was thus analyzed into twenty-four pictures of successive phases; and for the first time the human eye saw the actual positions of a horse's legs during the gallop or trot. It is not surprising that these pictures of Muybridge interested the French painters when he came to Paris, but fascinated still more the great student of animal movements, the physiologist Marey. He had contributed to science many an intricate apparatus for the registration of movement processes. "Marey's tambour" is still the most useful instrument in every physiological and psychological laboratory, whenever slight delicate movements are to be recorded. The movement of a bird's wings interested him especially, and at his suggestion Muybridge turned to the study of the flight of birds. Flying pigeons were photographed in different positions, each picture taken in a five-hundredth part of a second." --The Photoplay (1916) by Hugo Münsterberg "Male and female models, nude and clothed, were photographed in all manner of activity - walking, running, laying bricks, climbing stairs, fencing, jumping. Muybridge even photographed one girl throwing a bucket of water over another girl’s shoulders, and a mother spanking a child. His specific intention was to create an atlas for the use of artists, a visual dictionary of human and animal forms in action.” —The History of Photography: From 1839 to the Present, Beaumont Newhall, 1964. In 1887 the University of Pennsylvania published 781 of his photographic plates under the title of Animal Locomotion. "What has made these plates appealing to a general, and certainly a more prurient, audience ever since is that they are not limited to animal locomotion but they also depict human beings. The human figures are generally unclothed, with 133 sets of plates showing fully nude males photographed from the front, rear, and side. The most homoerotic of these plates are those numbered 345-348, which show two good-looking young men wrestling. In style, they are remarkably similar to the Los Angeles-based Athletic Model Guild in the 1950s and 1960s — provocative and arousing, and more explicit that their later counterparts." --cited in Silent Topics: Essays on Undocumented Areas of Silent Film (2005) by Anthony Slide Photos such as Woman Pouring a Bucket of Water on Other Woman and Spanking a Child have led art historian Marta Braun to claim that Eadweard Muybridge perhaps sought prurience next to scientific inquiry when he made the Animal Locomotion set. Braun argues in Picturing Time: The Work of Étienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904) that many of Muybridge's sequences of women show them engaged in "particularly awkward and ungainly actions and what were, at that time, certainly forbidden activities." She goes on in that same book by saying that "the photographs objectify erotic impulses and extend voyeuristic curiosity in language we now recognise as taken from the standard pornographic vocabulary." |
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Featured: |
Eadweard James Muybridge (9 April 1830 – 8 May 1904) was an English photographer important for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion and in motion-picture projection. He adopted the name Eadweard Muybridge, believing it to be the original Anglo-Saxon form of his name. He immigrated to the United States as a young man but remained obscure until 1868, when his large photographs of Yosemite Valley, California, made him world famous. Muybridge is known for his pioneering work on animal locomotion in 1877 and 1878, which used multiple cameras to capture motion in stop-action photographs, and his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the flexible perforated film strip used in cinematography.
In his earlier years in San Francisco, Muybridge had become known for his landscape photography, particularly of the Yosemite Valley. He also photographed the Tlingit people in Alaska, and was commissioned by the United States Army to photograph the Modoc War in 1873. In 1874 he shot and killed Major Harry Larkyns, his wife's lover, and was acquitted in a jury trial on the grounds of justifiable homicide. He travelled for more than a year in Central America on a photographic expedition in 1875.
In the 1880s, Muybridge entered a very productive period at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, producing over 100,000 images of animals and humans in motion, capturing what the human eye could not distinguish as separate movements. He spent much of his later years giving public lectures and demonstrations of his photography and early motion picture sequences. He also edited and published compilations of his work, which greatly influenced visual artists and the developing fields of scientific and industrial photography.
Legacy and representation in other media
Many of Muybridge's photographic sequences have been published since the 1950s as artists' reference books. Cartoon animators often use Muybridge's photos as a reference when drawing their characters in motion. Since 1991, the company Optical Toys has published Muybridge sequences in the form of movie flipbooks.
The filmmaker Thom Andersen made a 1974 documentary titled Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer, describing his life and work.
The composer Philip Glass's opera The Photographer (1982) is based on Muybridge's murder trial, with a libretto including text from the court transcript. A promotional music video featured an excerpt of the opera and numerous Muybridge images.
The play Studies in Motion: The Hauntings of Eadweard Muybridge (2006) was a co-production between Vancouver's Electric Company Theatre and the University of British Columbia Theatre. While blending fiction with fact, it conveys Muybridge's obsession with cataloguing animal motion. The production started touring in 2010.
The Canadian poet Rob Winger wrote Muybridge's Horse: A Poem in Three Phases (2007). The long poem won the CBC Literary Award for Poetry and was nominated for the Governor General's Award for Literature, the Trillium Book Award for Poetry, and the Ottawa Book Award. It expressed his life and obsessions in a 'poetic-photographic' style.
In 1985, the music video for Larry Gowan's single "(You're a) Strange Animal" prominently featured animation rotoscoped from Muybridge's work. In 1986, a galloping horse sequence was used in the background of the John Farnham music video for the song "Pressure Down". In 1993, the rock band U2 made a video of their song "Lemon" into a tribute to Muybridge's techniques. In 2004, the electronic music group The Crystal Method made a music video to their song "Born Too Slow", which was based on Muybridge's work, including a man walking in front of a background grid.
Kingston University's Eadweard Muybridge Building is named in honour of Muybridge, who was born in nearby Kingston upon Thames, England.
His work has influenced the following:
- Étienne-Jules Marey — recorded the first series of live action photos with a single camera by a method of chronophotography
- Thomas Eakins — American artist who worked with and continued Muybridge's motion studies, and incorporated the findings into his own artwork
- William Dickson — credited as inventor of the motion picture camera
- Thomas Edison — developed and owned patents for motion picture cameras
- Marcel Duchamp — artist, painted Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912)
- Harold Eugene Edgerton — pioneered stroboscopic and high speed photography and film, producing an Oscar-winning short movie and many striking photographic sequences
- Francis Bacon — artist who made numerous paintings from photographs by Muybridge
- John Gaeta — used the principles of Muybridge's photography to create the bullet time slow-motion technique of the 1999 movie The Matrix.
- Steven Pippin — so-called Young British Artist who converted a row of laundromat washing machines into sequential cameras in the style of Muybridge
On 9 April 2012, the 182nd birthday of Muybridge, Google honored him in a Google Doodle with an animation based on the photographs of the "horse in motion."
List of photos
- Animal Locomotion (1887)
See also
- Stanford and the trot question
- Media arts
- Precursors of film
- Pretexts for prurience in art
- Animated sequence of a buffalo (American bison) galloping
