MEN AND HORSES IN MOTION:Thomas Eakins and motion photography

Abstract

While a handful of articles and book chapters have addressed Thomas Eakins' work with motion photography during the spring and summers of 1884 and 1885, with few to no exceptions his work and photographs have been described as an activity he engaged in to advance and inform his artistic practice. A contextualized reading of Eakins' work, however, suggests the scholarship is incomplete. While the motion photographs can be read aesthetically, an artistic reading or a reading that privileges Eakins‐as‐artist overlooks their production and historical meaning. By placing Thomas Eakins' work within the context of his position as a professor of life sciences and his role on a commission overseeing the work of Eadweard Muybridge, a fuller, newer picture of his motion photographs emerge. The motion photographs Eakins produced were not aids for his paintings or products of artistic investigation; rather they are scientific documents that speak to his desire to contribute to and be a part of the field of science. Eakins motion photographs can also be seen to speak forcefully to his era. Mariana Griswold van Rensselaer, one of Thomas Eakins' contemporary art critics, wrote of Eakins: ‘Of all American artists he is the most typically national, the most devoted to the actual life about him, the most given to recording it without gloss or alteration.’ If Eakins sought to record modern America, he found a formal vocabulary in motion photography. As economic, cultural and technological developments converged to transform Americans' sense of time and space, Eakins' motion photographs spoke to and indeed helped produce those changes.