Animating images

Abstract

In the mid-19th century, portrait photographers used iron neck braces to steady their subjects and ensure that they remained static for the time required to expose photographic plates. The English photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904), who spent his working life in the USA, transformed photography by using linked sequences of cameras with fast shutter-speeds to record the components of animal and human locomotion. He also developed a primitive projector, the Zoopraxiscope, which used a stop-motion technique to show short, flickering sequences of animals in motion; and contributed to the development of the cinema. This pioneering work is the focus of an exhibition at San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art, Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change. In 1872, Muybridge invented and patented systems of cameras with high-speed electric or mechanical shutter releases that enabled him to make multiple exposures, lasting split seconds, in quick succession. He famously printed the freeze frame images he captured of a trotting racehorse and proved, for the first time, that horses can simultaneously lift all four hooves off the ground for a fraction of a second. For the next 30 years he photographed and catalogued locomotion in people and different species of animals. Muybridge lectured in Paris in 1881, where his demonstration to Étienne-Jules Marey convinced the eminent physiologist to focus solely on photography, as the best means of investigating motion. But Leland Stanford's book of 1882, The Horse in Motion, failed to acknowledge Muybridge's contribution by relegating him to the role of a technician and thereby damaging his reputation. So, in 1884, Muybridge sought scientific validation of his work at the University of Pennsylvania, where his photography was overseen by a distinguished committee that included neurologist Francis Dercum, anatomist Joseph Leidy, physiologist Harrison Allen, and engineer William Marks. Working at the university until 1886, Muybridge took more than 20 000 sequence photographs. Animal Locomotion was published in 11 volumes and comprised 19 347 individual shots. Pathological Locomotion (volume 8) includes about 30 sequences of clinical photographs, in which he captured impaired movement in patients at local hospitals. The clinical sequences include a boy with infantile paralysis, photographed walking on his hands and feet; and an adult man with hemiplegia, who was photographed walking with a cane. These images inspired some 20th-century artists. Francis Bacon owned three of Muybridge's books and hundreds of sheets of his images, which he annotated and used as sources for his compositions and individual figures; he imbued the child's ape-like gait with pathos in Paralytic Child Walking on All Fours (from Muybridge) of 1961. Muybridge's enduring legacy and influence is manifest in this remarkable exhibition.