Research take-aways – Eadweard Muybridge

A British photographer, Eadweard Muybridge is renowned for his ground breaking work in the field of motion-picture projection. He famously captured the complete sequence of a galloping horse using a multiple-camera set-up and then by inventing a projection machine called the zoopraxiscope, projected moving images.

“Only photography has been able to divide human life into a series of moments, each of them has the value of a complete existence.”

(Muybridge, E.)

Eadweard Muybridge, is often referred to as the man who captured time. Humans have always sought to understand the natural world and the mystery of the galloping horse and its obsession by one man, Leland Stanford, the man who founded Stanford university, led to the solving of this mystery when he hired photographer Eadweard Muybridge in the 1870’s.

In 1860, after meeting with a serious accident, he spent six years recuperating in England after which he returned to photography in 1866 and quickly became a masterful one, capturing Yosemite, lighthouses, self portraits, etc. His inventiveness led him to create a sky shade, a screen that shielded the sun’s light enough to capture the landscape while still being able to retain and render the sky’s tone, in response to photographers who painted or superimposed clouds in their pictures. According to one of the theories, the accident caused a damage to his orbitofrontal cortex, along with altering his emotions, as injuries to this area are sometimes connected to obsessive compulsive disorder, perhaps explaining why he became so obsessive about his photographic work (Weston Phippen, 2016)

Muybridge’s work, initially was more concerned with finding scientific pursuit to find answers to curiosities of the mind. He worked hard for the advancement of photography during his career and is known for quickening the camera shutter speed to a fraction of a second and invented ways to freeze time with his multiple camera and lens set up. He had taken photography to an advanced level where he was able to capture constant movement and by early 1870’s he had invented mechanical shutters that involved the usage of a trigger and rubber springs to snap two planks shut in front of the lens at 1/1000th of a second (Weston Phippen, 2016)

Leland Stanford had been funding Muybridge’s work for years now. In his quest to understand how horses ran so perhaps he could make them run even faster and also to prove his theory that a galloping horse was momentarily airborne, in his role as a horse breeder, trainer and racer, hired Eadweard Muybridge in the 1870’s. Photography had barely been around for 50 years at this time when Muybridge started work with Stanford’s horses; more about origins of photography can be read n my post here. These stables eventually became the present day Stanford University. In 1877, at a SanFrancisco racing track, Muybridge attempted his first trial of this experiment by stringing a thread across the track at horse-chest height which then facilitated a trigger that was attached to his camera (Weston Phippen, 2016).

The first image he captured, proved to be a disappointment for Muybridge at least, even though it managed to record the horse with all four hooves off the ground and was a great achievement as it was the first record of it ever, being published by a few Newspapers even – it wasn’t good enough to understand motion as it was a single image and what Muybridge needed was to slice this movement into parts, which would take yet another year before it happened. In the summer of 1878, he welcomed reporters to his great experiment once again at the Stanford stables. He had, in collaboration with Stanford’s engineers, set up a system requiring complex technology, attaching a series of wires that ran from the angled wall at an interval of every 21 inches to the shed that housed a bank of dozens of cameras. The running horse on the track would trip the wires, pulling the trigger that closed the electrical circuit, simultaneously releasing rubber springs loaded at 100 pounds of pressure that snapped the shutters closed at one-thousandth of a second, resulting in the image below. His experiment was successful, a feat unimaginable five years back (Weston Phippen, 2016).

Possessed with a microscopic fixation with motion, he began to photograph flying birds, leaping cats, galloping bisons, women lifting bedsheets, raising cigarettes to their lips, etc; examples of which can be seen below.

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His work, Crossing brook on step-stones with fishing-pole and can, is a series consisting of 36 pictures from three different angles and records every movement made by the woman in the frame, and has been a source of motion study by various artists, including Edgar Degas and Marcel Duchamp and also interested the University of Philadelphia for the potential insight that such a study could offer in the fields of sports, medicine and physiology. His works at this time are representative of human curiosity as machines became a part of everyday lives and people began to notice similarities between the machines and their bodies (Weston Phippen, 2016).

HIs incredible achievement of recording sequences of movements using dozens of cameras to depict motion would be called film in today’s context. A year later after his successful horse experiment, he developed the zoopraxiscope- “a machine that used a glass disc spun around a projection lantern” that projected images in rapid succession onto a screen from photographs printed on a rotating glass disc, producing the illusion of moving images, a forerunner to cinema and uncannily similar to the modern day GIFs (Weston Phippen, 2016)

Key points and learnings from Muybridge’s works-

• Don’t give up till you succeed.
• If he could freeze motion in 1880 and you can’t freeze it in the 2020, then there is seriously something wrong with you – a head injury might help like in Muybridge’s case.
• Determination and experimentation
• He worked with piegons!!! Another sign!
• His invention of the stop-motion is one of the most significant findings in the field of photography, one that is sought after even now.
• Very inspirational.

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Bibliography

Fig 1 Muybridge, E. (1878) The Horse In Motion. [Photograph] At: http://100photos.time.com/photos/eadweard-muybridge-horse-in-motion#photograph (Accessed 15/06/2020).

Fig 2 Muybridge, E. (1887) Figure Hopping. [Photograph] At: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Eadweard-Muybridge (Accessed 15/06/2020).

Fig 3 Muybridge, E. (1887) Leopard leaping, Animal Locomotion series, circa 1887 [Photograph] At: http://100photos.time.com/photos/eadweard-muybridge-horse-in-motion#photograph (Accessed 15/06/2020).

Fig 4 Muybridge, E. (1887) Pigeon in flight, Animal Locomotion series, circa 1887 [Photograph] At: http://100photos.time.com/photos/eadweard-muybridge-horse-in-motion#photograph (Accessed 15/06/2020).

Fig 5 Muybridge, E. (1887) Horse with rider, Animal Locomotion series, circa 1887 [Photograph] At: http://100photos.time.com/photos/eadweard-muybridge-horse-in-motion#photograph (Accessed 15/06/2020).

Fig 6 Muybridge, E. (1887) 24 frames show man in loincloth running, Animal Locomotion series, circa 1887 [Photograph] At: http://100photos.time.com/photos/eadweard-muybridge-horse-in-motion#photograph (Accessed 15/06/2020).

Fig 7 Muybridge, E. (1887) 12 frames motion of 2 men boxing, Animal Locomotion series, circa 1887 [Photograph] At: http://100photos.time.com/photos/eadweard-muybridge-horse-in-motion#photograph (Accessed 15/06/2020).

Fig 8 Muybridge, E. (1887) Woman opening Umbrella, Animal Locomotion series, circa 1887 [Photograph] At: http://100photos.time.com/photos/eadweard-muybridge-horse-in-motion#photograph (Accessed 15/06/2020).

Muybridge, E. (1884-1887) Crossing Brook On Step-Stones With Fishing-Pole And Basket. [Photograph] At: https://www.gettyimages.in/detail/news-photo/crossing-brook-on-step-stones-with-fishing-pole-and-can-news-photo/151890312?adppopup=true (Accessed 15/06/2020).

Artnet.com. (2020) Eadweard Muybridge | Artnet. At: http://www.artnet.com/artists/eadweard-muybridge/ (Accessed 15/06/2020).

Encyclopedia Britannica. (2020) Eadweard Muybridge | British Photographer. At: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Eadweard-Muybridge (Accessed 15/06/2020).

Weston Phippen, J. (2016) The Man Who Captured Time|The Atlantic. At: https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/07/eadweard-muybridge/483381/ (Accessed 15/06/2020).