Eadweard Muybridge

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Eadweard Muybridge. Age portrait taken after 1890 by the American photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston .

Eadweard Muybridge (born April 9, 1830 in Kingston upon Thames ; † May 8, 1904 there ; actually Edward James Muggeridge ) was a British photographer and pioneer of photographic technology .

Muybridge emigrated to America at a young age and came to San Francisco in the mid-1850s , where he initially worked as a bookseller. On a trip to Europe, Muybridge suffered a severe head injury from which he recovered in England between 1861 and 1866. During this stay in England he probably also learned the craft of photography.

On his return to California , he began a career as a photographer, during which he captured what is now Yosemite National Park , the lighthouses of the Pacific coast and the war against the Modoc tribe . His panoramas of San Francisco from 1877 and 1878, composed of several photographs, are among the most detailed images of the city before the great earthquake of 1906 .

In 1874, Muybridge shot and killed his wife Flora's lover, but was acquitted by the jury in the ensuing trial. He was the last murder accused in California who, despite an admission of guilt, was not convicted for his acts.

Four years later, on behalf of Governor Leland Stanford , Muybridge captured the individual phases of the movement of a galloping horse for the first time, thus establishing chronophotography . A year later, he presented his zoo practice to an amazed audience in Palo Alto , with which he brought the individual images to life on a canvas in a sequence of movements.

In the following years, Muybridge published his results in a number of books and went on lecture tours to Europe. His work Animal Locomotion , published in 1887, influenced artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Francis Bacon with his movement studies .

life and work

Origin and education

The coronation stone in Kingston upon Thames commemorates the coronation of various Anglo-Saxon kings (here: Eadweard II. )

Eadweard Muybridge was born in 1830 under the name Edward James Muggeridge as the son of John Muggeridge and his wife Susannah in Kingston upon Thames, England. Muybridge's father was a coal and grain merchant who sold goods shipped across the Thames in barges to the Kingston upon Thames malthouses . Kingston upon Thames, at that time a trading town upstream from London , had served seven Anglo-Saxon kings as a coronation place between 900 and 1016 . Two of these kings were named Edward and it is believed that the spelling of their names on the coronation stone placed in the city prompted Muybridge to change his first name to "Eadweard".

Not much is known about Muybridge's schooling. His biographer Gordon Hendricks doubts the account, which can sometimes be found in the literature, that Muybridge attended Latin school in Kingston's Lovekyn Chapel (now Kingston Grammar School ) because, as the son of a simple trader, he did not have the necessary qualifications to attend such an institution have. Nonetheless, later remarks by Muybridge indicate that he had a solid basic knowledge of English literature, grammar and mathematics. Muybridge only acquired his knowledge of French, German and Italian as an adult in self-study.

Emigration and first years in San Francisco

San Francisco around 1860. Work by the French painter Isidore Laurent Deroy (1797–1886). If you compare this view with the later photographs of Muybridge, it becomes obvious how much the city changed during Muybridge's time on the American west coast. San Francisco must have held a great fascination for Muybridge, as the city was one of his favorite subjects.

At the age of 21 or 22, Muybridge immigrated to the United States . He arrived in America in 1852 and initially stayed in New York , where he befriended the daguerreotypist Silas Wright Selleck . In the same year he went to San Francisco , which at the time was very attractive to European adventurers due to the California gold rush . By 1855 at the latest, Muybridge also moved to San Francisco, where Selleck had opened his own photo studio in the meantime.

According to a newspaper advertisement placed by himself, Muybridge acted as a representative of the London Printing and Publishing Company from 1856 at the latest . His bookstore was one of a total of 40 of its kind in a city that was a melting pot of immigrants and fortune seekers of various origins and which grew from 460 to 56,000 inhabitants between 1847 and 1860. In Muybridge's first years in San Francisco, he also changed his surname several times from "Muggeridge" to "Muggridge" to "Muygridge". He only adopted the spelling “Muybridge” when he began to work as a photographer in the 1860s.

Apparently Muybridge's San Francisco business was doing so well that in 1859 he was elected to one of the prestigious boards of the Mercantile Library , a commercial literature library. A year later, he brought his two younger brothers to California and handed over the flourishing bookselling business to his brother Thomas. He himself planned to travel to Europe after a previous visit to the Sierra Nevada (in the area of ​​today's Yosemite National Park ) to buy books there.

Accident and the 'lost years'

It is not certain whether Muybridge actually visited the Sierra Nevada before leaving for Europe. What is certain, however, is that he missed his ship and instead took the stagecoach to St. Louis and then took the train to New York. The journey led through Texas , where - according to Muybridge's own statement - the carriage pulled by "six wild mustangs" got out of control and smashed against a tree. Muybridge suffered a serious head injury in this accident and saw everything twice for a long time . After a stay in Fort Smith , he traveled to New York and from there to London, where he was treated by the respected doctor William Gull .

At the London World's Fair in 1862, Muybridge may have learned about the work of British photographers.

Little is known about Muybridge's life in England between 1861 and 1866, which led biographers such as Robert Bartlett Haas to refer to this period as the ' Lost Years '. After a damages lawsuit against the operators of the stagecoach, Muybridge had received $ 2,500 in compensation. His biographer Brian Clegg suspects that Muybridge - in this way financially secure - waited in England for the end of the Civil War (1861-1865).

What is certain is that Muybridge's interest in photography increased during this period. It is commonly believed that his doctor William Gull recommended that he be outdoors as much as possible, and that this gave Muybridge's fascination for landscape photography. It is also possible that Muybridge got to know the works of British photographers at the London World's Fair in 1862 and was inspired by them. When Muybridge returned to San Francisco in 1867, he had learned the technical fundamentals of photography to such an extent that he went freelance as a photographer.

Start of his career as a photographer

Back of a stereoscopic photo card with the words “Helios Flying Studio. Edward J. Muybridge. Photographic View Artist "(1870)

American landscape photography was in its infancy in the late 1860s. At a time when photography had not yet established itself as an art form in its own right, pastoral works by painters at the Hudson River School satisfied the public's hunger for depictions of pristine landscapes.

In the spring of 1867, Muybridge went to the Yosemite Valley to take pictures . Until then, the American public had known this part of the West primarily from newspaper reports, literary descriptions and the landscape photographs by Carleton Watkins . He carried his equipment, consisting of a plate camera in recording format 5½ "× 8½", a stereo camera , a tent converted into a darkroom and the chemicals required for on-site development, on a horse-drawn cart . Muybridge roamed the Yosemite wilderness for five months, creating more than 170 recordings, which he marketed under the company name "Helios Flying Studio" and with which he sought to surpass Watkins.

With his photos of the Yosemite Falls , Muybridge took up a popular theme in 19th century British and American art. His work Pi-wi-ack (Cataract of Stars), Vernal Fall, 450 feet fall (4054) , created in 1867, shows Vernal Fall in a conventional composition, framed by trees. If one compares the photo with the painting Niagara Falls, from the American Side by Frederic Edwin Church from the same year , it is noticeable that the water in Muybridge's photo is almost ghostly and blurred due to the long exposure time of the collodion wet plate he used . Muybridge's biographer Philip Brookman points out that in Church's realistic painting time seems to stand still, while Muybridge's portrayal gives an indication of the sheer volume of water as an "integral function of the natural environment."

Muybridge's Yosemite photos were enthusiastically received. The Daily Alta California newspaper called his photographs "a true representation of nature" and the Photographic Society of Pennsylvania praised Muybridge's "artistic skill in the selection of motifs and his special talent, which is reflected in their photographic reproduction". The latter judgment in particular was significant, as Philadelphia was considered the birthplace of American landscape photography.

Early footage of San Francisco, Northern California, and Alaska

In February 1868, Muybridge announced that he was accepting orders to capture "private homes, views, animals, ships, etc. anywhere in the city [San Francisco] or at any point on the Pacific coast." For these early photographs of San Francisco and Northern California, Muybridge developed his own techniques and tools. So he deliberately underexposed some pictures and painted a small moon on the negatives in order to sell the results as night pictures. He compensated for the too bright rendition of blue tones in the collodion process used at the time by darkening the sky in his photos using a “sky shade” that he developed especially for this purpose. In this way - comparable to the use of today's gray graduated filters  - he succeeded in correctly exposing the sky and the clouds without underexposing the other parts of the image. Later, he followed the then common practice of exposing two separate photo plates (one for the sky and one for the landscape) and then copying them together to form a single image.

Alaska Ter. - Fort Tongass. Group of Indians , stereoscopic photo card from the Views of the Pacific Coast series . Marta Braun places Muybridge's photos of the Tlingit in the tradition of the typical representation of indigenous peoples in photography from around the middle of the 19th century.

At the end of the 1860s, Muybridge also began to capture numerous motifs in stereo image pairs. Stereoscopic photo cards, which produced a spatial effect when viewed through a stereoscope, were mass-produced in the 19th century and were extremely popular with the public. Muybridge's increasing fame led to his taking part in General Henry Wager Halleck's expedition to Alaska in 1868 on behalf of the government . One year after the purchase of Alaska from Russia, the expedition served, among other things, to legitimize the controversial acquisition of this supposedly worthless land mass. Muybridge documented the landscape and the indigenous population of Alaska, the architecture of the city of Sitka , its inhabitants and the American military facilities to control the new territory. His photographs of the Tlingit are among the earliest photographic representations of the indigenous peoples of Alaska. Upon his return, General Halleck praised the fact that Muybridge's recordings "gave a more precise idea of ​​Alaska [...] than any written description of the country." Muybridge, always striving for self-promotion, referred to himself from then on as "official photographer of the US government" and "head of photographic investigations of the Pacific coast".

Other government contracts - lighthouses of the California Pacific coast and Modoc war

Point Reyes Lighthouse in a recording of Muybridge from 1871 (original title: First-Order Light-house at Punta de los Reyes, Seacoast of California, 296 Feet Above Sea )

After Muybridge had documented the work on the Central Pacific Railroad , the construction of the new mint in San Francisco and the Woodward's Gardens amusement park in a series of pictures in the years after 1868 , he accepted another government contract in early 1871. For the United States Lighthouse Board , he traveled along the Pacific coast on a steamship to capture the lighthouses of California . Muybridge's biographer Philip Brookman describes the resulting works as "some of the most brilliant and significant landscape shots" by the photographer. The ocean appears mostly misty in these images and the lighthouses themselves are shown in the context of the sloping cliffs of California to highlight the dangers for shipping. According to Brookman, the documentary interests of his clients "didn't stop [Muybridge] from expanding the conventions of landscape photography." As an example, Brookman cites a photograph of the Point Reyes lighthouse , where Muybridge's camera appears to be floating in the air (see illustration). In view of this assessment, it is noteworthy that Muybridge's series of pictures on the lighthouses of California is not even mentioned in a number of publications - especially when the authors focus on Muybridge's role as an early representative of chronophotography .

Around a year and a half after completing his work for the Lighthouse Board, Muybridge accepted another government contract. For the United States Army he photographed the area around Tule Lake, south of today's Oregon border , the scene of the Modoc War in 1873. Since the available photographic technology could not yet capture moving objects in the picture, he concentrated - as well already Roger Fenton in his photographs of the Crimean War from 1855 - on the presentation of geographical features and portraits of the fighters. Today, Muybridge's photographs are considered the most important visual evidence of the war. Since the halftone printing process was not used extensively for the illustration of newspaper reports until decades later, Muybridge's photos were distributed as copperplate engravings in written depictions of the events of the war. Muybridge's pictures thus reached a large audience when they were published in Harper's Weekly on June 21, 1873.

The murder of Harry Larkyns

In the trial for the murder of Harry Larkyns, Muybridge's attorney Pendegast tried to portray him as a mentally confused eccentric. Here a portrait from 1872 attributed to Charles Leander Weed by Muybridge.

In May 1871, Muybridge had married Flora Downs. The two had met in a photo studio in San Francisco, where Flora worked as a retoucher . After Flora had given birth to their son Florado Helios in April 1874, Muybridge had doubts a few months later that he was the biological father of the child. Muybridge found a photograph of the baby with midwife Susan Smith, on the back of which his wife had written “Little Harry!”. He then confronted Smith and learned that Flora had been dating a man named Harry Larkyns for some time. Deeply disturbed by this discovery, Muybridge took a ferry to Vallejo on October 17, 1874 , traveled by train to Calistoga and from there by carriage to the Yellow Jacket Mine , where Larkyns worked. Muybridge surprised his wife's lover while playing cards at night and shot him with a revolver. Three miners then brought Muybridge to Calistoga and handed him over to the local sheriff.

Muybridge was in custody in Napa until he was tried there in February 1875. He was due to premeditated murder (first degree murder) accused punishable by death. In court, one of his three lawyers, William Wirt Pendegast , pleaded insanity with reference to Muybridge's previous carriage accident and the serious head injury he sustained, but could not convince the jury. After a closing argument, which was described in a report in the San Francisco Chronicle as one of the most eloquent that one had ever heard in California, Muybridge was acquitted on February 6, 1875 for " justifiable homicide " . In early May, Flora was awarded a monthly payment of $ 50 - but she died of an illness in July of the same year at the age of only 24. Florado Helios spent the next few years in a Catholic orphanage and Muybridge paid for the costs until mid-1878. Muybridge's biographer, Rebecca Solnit, points out in a 2010 BBC television documentary titled The Weird World of Eadweard Muybridge that Muybridge's case was the last in California to acquit a murderer despite admitted guilt.

Trip to Central America and panoramic shots of San Francisco

Only a few weeks after his acquittal, Muybridge traveled to Central America on a steamer , where he was commissioned by the Pacific Mail Steamship Company to take photos of cities in Panama and of coffee growing in Guatemala . After the completion of the first transcontinental rail link between New York and San Francisco, the Pacific Mail Steamship Company feared a loss of income and tried to upgrade its role in Central American trade through Muybridge's recordings. Under the name "Eduardo Santiago Muybridge", Muybridge produced a series of around 400 photos that he took after his return to San Francisco at the end of 1875 under the title The Pacific Coast of Central America and Mexico; Isthmus of Panama; Guatemala; and the Cultivation and Shipment of Coffee . The photos exhibited at the Eleventh Industrial Exhibition in San Francisco earned him a gold medal. The jury commented that Muybridge's work "made it difficult to believe that [...] photography could still make great strides towards absolute perfection".

Since Muybridge's arrival in San Francisco in the mid-1850s, the city had grown many times over. For decades, San Francisco was the largest city west of the Mississippi and the public interest in the former center of the gold rush was correspondingly great. In 1877 and 1878, Muybridge created large-format panoramas of the city, with which he satisfied both the pride of the local audience and the curiosity of the people of the American East Coast about the American West .

360 ° panorama of San Francisco from 1878, composed of 13 albumen prints. When unfolded, the panorama is around 61 cm high and 528 cm long.

Muybridge’s biographer Rebecca Solnit sees in the monumental second panorama from 1878 (see illustration) Muybridge’s departure from landscape photography at a time when he was at the height of his work. In contrast to the previous panorama from 1877, Muybridge took the individual images with his plate camera in portrait format and combined 13 instead of eleven images to form a large-format view that exceeded all previous attempts of this kind. According to Philip Brookman's judgment, this Panorama of San Francisco from California Street Hill, San Francisco, California is "one of Muybridge's greatest achievements" and, because of its hitherto unattained level of detail, an incomparable document of the cityscape before the great earthquake of 1906 .

Phases of movement of a galloping horse - the beginnings of chronophotography

Muybridge's facility in Palo Alto, 1879. The building on the right-hand side of the picture houses the cameras. On the left you can see a white wall, against the background of which the horses were photographed in their movement.

As early as the spring of 1872, the railway entrepreneur Leland Stanford had commissioned Muybridge to use his camera to answer the question of whether a galloping horse always has at least one hoof on the ground or whether all four hooves are briefly in the air. The result, a photo of Stanford's racehorse Occident with all four hooves in the air, is lost today. However, on this first attempt, Muybridge did not succeed in capturing the individual phases of the movement in a series of recordings. So now, around five years later, he made another attempt.

At Stanford's ranch in Palo Alto , Muybridge built a facility, the construction of which was completed in May 1878. In this test arrangement, the galloping horse ran along a white wall. Across from this wall were twelve - later 24 - cameras with lenses of the same focal length in a row. The specialty of the cameras were their special shutters , the moving elements of which were controlled by electromagnets and which enabled an exposure time of less than half a second that was previously unattainable . A fine wire ran across the track from each lock. The tearing of the wire by the horse's hooves triggered the respective camera by means of an electrical impulse.

After the first test runs, Muybridge invited a number of press representatives on June 15, 1878, before their eyes he successfully carried out the experiment. The assembled eyewitnesses were overwhelmed by the result. A journalist for the Sacramento Daily Union wrote three days later that only the invention of the telephone and the phonograph exceeded Muybridge's achievements.

For his part, Muybridge immediately began to market his recordings. He published a series of cabinet size prints entitled The Horse in Motion and mailed them to newspapers and magazines, spreading word of his motion studies both in the United States and internationally. In October 1878, the popular science magazine Scientific American published some drawings based on Muybridge's photographs, indicating that the artists had apparently misrepresented the movement of the horse's legs for centuries. The painter Thomas Eakins immediately began using Muybridge's Horse in Motion for his own work. His painting A May Morning in the Park (The Fairman Rogers Four-in-Hand) is now considered to be one of the first correct depictions of horses in motion based on Muybridge’s studies.

Moving images: the zoo practice

Mule Bucking and Kicking, 13 phases , a disc for Muybridge's zoopraxiscope. The projection of the rotating disk created the impression of a fluid movement.

In 1879, Muybridge began trying to combine his individual images in such a way that the illusion of fluid movement was created. Brian Clegg suspects that Muybridge was inspired by a comment in the Scientific American . The article on Muybridge's experiment in Palo Alto stated that the reader could cut out the images in order to create moving images in a zoetrope . However, the results were so unconvincing that Muybridge, after further attempts with a praxinoscope - a forerunner of cinematography developed by Émile Reynaud around 1877  - developed his own device: the zoopraxiskcope . What was new about the zoopraxiscope was that the projected moving images - unlike all its predecessors - were based on a series of photographs as a template.

Muybridge showed his moving images for the first time as part of a private screening at Leland Stanford's home. At the beginning of May 1880, he presented the apparatus to the assembled press at the San Francisco Art Association . A reporter for the newspaper The Daily Alta California ruled: "Mr. Muybridge has laid the foundation for a new method of entertainment and we prophesy that his moment photographic magic lantern -Zoetrop will make its way through the civilized world."

Lecture tours through Europe and Animal Locomotion

In September 1881, Muybridge traveled to Paris with financial support from Stanford, where he met the inventor and photography pioneer Étienne-Jules Marey and the painter Ernest Meissonier , among others . Muybridge’s lectures in Paris were enthusiastically received by the French audience. By increasing its profile, Muybridge hoped to find sponsors for a planned larger project involving further animal movement studies.

In February 1882, Muybridge traveled on to London to give lectures to members of the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Arts . But already in April it became known that Leland Stanford, together with his doctor Jacob Davis Babcock Stillman, had published The Horse in Motion as Shown by Instantaneous Photography, with a Study on Animal Mechanics, Founded on Anatomy and the Revelations of the Camera, in Which Is Demonstrated the Theory of Quadrupedal Locomotion without adequately recognizing Muybridge's part in it. Suspected of deception, Muybridge received a message from the Royal Society that he was no longer welcome to publish an article in their respected journal Proceedings of the Royal Society . Deeply humiliated, he returned to America on June 5, where he later tried unsuccessfully to seek compensation of $ 50,000 in a trial against Stanford.

Plate 187 from Muybridge's work Animal Locomotion (in the 1887 edition)

Through the mediation of the painter Thomas Eakins and the equestrian expert Fairman Rogers , William Pepper , then Chancellor of the University of Pennsylvania , could be won over in August 1883 to finance further photographic movement studies. Under the supervision of a scientific advisory board, Muybridge began his work in March 1884 on the premises of the veterinary institute. In the dry gelatin procedures published from 1884 to 1885 captured images Muybridge in his until now best known work entitled Animal Locomotion: On Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements . It contains movement studies of different animal species as well as naked, half-naked or slightly veiled children, women and men.

The influence of Animal Locomotion with its more than 20,000 individual images on 781 panels was immense and continues to this day. The French-American painter Marcel Duchamp was inspired for his work Nude, Descending a Staircase No. 2 by Muybridge's pioneering work in the field of serial photography, as was the British painter Francis Bacon or the special effects artist Tim MacMillan , who explicitly inspired Muybridge's work as an inspiration for the im Film Matrix called the bullet-time technique used.

Last years and death

Meissonier's painting Campagne de France, 1814 from 1864

After the publication of Animal Locomotion in 1887, Muybridge went on lecture tours again. In addition to his own photographic studies of movement, he often showed works by well-known painters. Using works such as Meissonier's Campagne de France, 1814 , he tried to work out the weaknesses of the earlier artistic representation of animals. In this way, according to his biographer Philip Brookman, Muybridge continued to influence artists such as Frederic Remington and Edgar Degas in his later years . In the spring of 1893, Muybridge published a paper based on his lectures under the title Descriptive Zoopraxography, or the Science of Animal Locomotion Made Popular .

In mid-1894 Muybridge returned to Kingston upon Thames, where he wrote two more books: Animals in Motion, an Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Progressive Movements , published in 1899, and The Human Figure in Motion, an Electro- Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Muscular Action in 1901. Three years after completing his last work, Muybridge died of prostate cancer on May 8, 1904 .

Effect and reception

No other nineteenth-century photographer in the American West had such a long-lasting impact as Eadweard Muybridge. His movement studies influenced contemporaries such as the painters Thomas Eakins and Edgar Degas as well as numerous artists of the 20th century, among whom Marcel Duchamp and Francis Bacon are most frequently mentioned in works on Muybridge. Its influence even extends to the present day, when the popular film Matrix comes up with special effects inspired by Muybridge. So it is not surprising that Muybridge’s biographer Marta Braun rates him as a “pioneering figure in the history of photography”.

In the course of his career as a photographer, Muybridge was always aware of the importance of his own image in public and tried to influence it from an early age. Corey waiter points to the numerous name changes and interprets them as an attempt own brand (Engl. Brand ) to develop. This attempt also includes Muybridge's alter ego "Helios", with which he not only labeled numerous of his photos, but also chose it as the middle name for his supposed son. The multiple name changes are interpreted by modern biographers not only as a marketing tool, but also as an expression of the fact that Muybridge reinvented itself again and again.

Eadweard Muybridge statue on the Letterman Digital Arts Center campus in the Presidio of San Francisco . The plaque attached to the statue identifies Muybridge as the "Father of Cinematography".

Muybridge's versatility can be seen in the long series of roles that he has played in the course of his life. Marta Braun describes him as a “photographer, self-promoter, entertainer, speaker, animation artist, entrepreneur, inventor, venture capitalist and murderer”. However, early biographies often highlight the role that Muybridge played as a pioneer in chronophotography . He is sometimes stylized as the "father of the cinema". Solnit mockingly remarks that Muybridge is often referred to as the “father of something”. In contrast, Muybridge's achievements as a landscape photographer are given less consideration in these early assessments - especially against the background of the rejection of pictorialism by modern artists. Braun attributes this to the fact that works by photographers such as Carleton Watkins or Timothy O'Sullivan fit better into the aesthetic discourse on modern photography.

In the 21st century, the view of Muybridge began to expand. Rebecca Solnit, in her 2003 book River of Shadows, places Muybridge in the larger context of cultural change at the end of the 19th century, as does Brian Clegg in his 2007 work The man who stopped time . This perspective was also followed by the first major Muybridge retrospective curated by Philip Brookman at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC in 2010.

Publications (selection)

Publications during Muybridge's lifetime

  • Animals in motion: an electro-photographic investigation of consecutive phases of animal progressive movements , Philadelphia 1887, London 1899, available online in the London 1902 edition (contains a selection of plates from the 1887 Philadelphia edition) via the Internet Archive .
  • Descriptive Zoopraxography: or the science of animal locomotion; Made popular by Eadweard Muybridge; with selected outline tracings reduced from some of the illustrations of “Animal Locomotion”, an electro-photographic investigation of consecutive phases of animal movements, commenced 1872, completed 1885, and published 1887, under auspices of the University of Pennsylvania; published as a memento of a series of lectures given by the author under the auspices of the United States Government Bureau of Education at the World's Columbian Exposition, in Zoopraxographical Hall 1893 , [Philadelphia] 1893, available online via Projekt Gutenberg .
  • The human figure in motion: An electro-photographic investigation of consecutive phases of muscular actions , London 1901, available online from Stanford Libraries.

Modern editions

  • Muybridge's Complete human and animal locomotion: all 781 plates from the 1887 “Animal locomotion” , unabridged new edition of the 11-volume edition Philadelphia 1887, with an introduction by Anita Ventura Mozley, 3 volumes, New York, 1979.
    • Volume 1: Original vol. 1 & 2: Males (nude); 3 & 4: Females (nude) , ISBN 0-486-23792-3 .
    • Volume 2: Original vol. 5: Males (pelvis cloth); 6: Females (semi-nude & transparent drapery) & children; 7: Males & females (draped) & miscellaneous subjects; 8: Abnormal movements, males & females (nude & semi-nude) , ISBN 0-486-23793-1 .
    • Volume 3: Original vol. 9: Horses; 10: domestic animals; 11: Wild animals and birds; Original prospectus & catalog of plates , ISBN 0-486-23794-X .
  • Eadweard Muybridge: the human and animal locomotion photographs , ed. by Hans Christian Adam, Cologne 2010 (and several new editions), ISBN 978-3-8365-0941-1 .

literature

Web links

Commons : Eadweard Muybridge  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Remarks

  1. Exemplary Philip Brookman, Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change , in: Philip Brookman [among others]: Eadweard Muybridge , London 2010, pp. 23-109, here p. 25.
  2. a b Gordon Hendricks, Eadweard Muybridge. The Father of the Motion Picture , Mineola NY 1975, p. 4.
  3. See Weston J. Naef, Era of Exploration. The Rise of Landscape Photography in the American West, 1860-1885 , Boston 1975, p. 169.
  4. ↑ There is no written evidence of Muybridge's arrival in America in 1852. The time is based on Muybridge's later statements to friends and is classified as reliable by Hendricks. Hendricks, Eadweard Muybridge , p. 5.
  5. For this, the most detailed Marta Braun, Eadweard Muybridge , London 2010, p. 18
  6. For more information, see Brookman, Muybridge in a Time of Change , p. 30.
  7. ^ Rebecca Solnit: River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West , New York 2003, p. 30.
  8. Brookman, Muybridge in a Time of Change , p. 30.
  9. See Gordon Hendricks, Eadweard Muybridge. The Father of the Motion Picture , Mineola NY, 1975, pp. 5-8.
  10. Hendricks' assumption that Muybridge was so fascinated by the Sierra Nevada that he missed his ship because of it ("he was apparently too taken by Yosemite to make it", Hendricks, Eadweard Muybridge , p. 10) is just as unconfirmed as Brauns Statement that Muybridge did not see Yosemite that year ("he didn't go to Yosemite", Braun, Eadweard Muybridge , p. 25). Brookman points out that there is no evidence that Muybridge actually traveled to Yosemite in May or June 1860 (“There is no evidence that Muybridge actually traveled to Yosemite in May or June of 1860”, Brookman, Muybridge in a Time of Change , p . 32).
  11. ^ "I left on a stage drawn by six wild mustangs", quoted here from Solnit, River of Shadows , p. 38.
  12. ^ Robert Bartlett Haas, Muybridge: Man in Motion , Berkeley [et al.] 1976, p. 10.
  13. ^ Brian Clegg, The man who stopped time. The illuminating story of Eadweard Muybridge - pioneer photographer, father of the motion picture, murderer , Washington DC 2007, p. 27. This assumption is also taken up by Solnit, River of Shadows , p. 39.
  14. ^ For example, Solnit, River of Shadows , p. 39, or Braun, Eadweard Muybridge , p. 29f.
  15. For more details on this, Brookman, Muybridge in a Time of Change , pp. 34–37.
  16. Braun, Eadweard Muybridge , p. 41. More detailed on Watkins and his relationship with Muybridge Braun, Eadweard Muybridge , pp. 39–41.
  17. "Muybridge's camera traces the water's path through time and fixes its position, offering evidence of its volume as an integra function of the natural environment rather than as a function of how we perceive or experience it", Brookman, Muybridge in a Time of Change , P. 41.
  18. "a true copy of Nature", quoted here from Brookman, Muybridge in a Time of Change , p. 43.
  19. "That this Society takes great pleasure in attesting their high appreciation of the artistic skill in the selection of these views, and the eminent talent evinced in their photographic reproduction", quoted here from Braun, Eadweard Muybridge , p. 44.
  20. Braun, Eadweard Muybridge , p. 44.
  21. "HELIOS is prepared to accept commissions to photograph Private Residences, Views, Animals, Ships, etc. anywhere in the city, or any point of the Pacific Coast", says Muybridge in his brochure Yo-sem-i-te , Kingston Museum scrapbook, p. 15, quoted here from Brookman, Muybridge in a Time of Change , p. 44.
  22. For more details, see Brookman, Muybridge in a Time of Change , p. 45.
  23. ^ "His images of the Tlingit are typical of mid-nineteenth-century photographs of non-Europeans [...]", Braun, Eadweard Muybridge , p. 50.
  24. ^ So Brookman, Muybridge in a Time of Change , p. 47.
  25. ^ "[...] these views [...] give a more correct idea of ​​Alaska [...] than can be obtained from any written description of that country", from a letter from Halleck to Muybridge dated October 13, 1868, in: Henry Halleck letter book , National Archives and Records Administration, Washington DC, p. 450, quoted here from Brookman, Muybridge in a Time of Change , p. 48.
  26. "official photographer of the US government" and "director of photographic surveys on the Pacific Coast", quoted here from Brookman, Muybridge in a Time of Change , p. 48.
  27. ^ "Muybridge's photographs of lighthouses and the surrounding coastal terrain are some of his most luminous and meaningful landscapes", Brookman, Muybridge in a Time of Change , p. 53.
  28. ^ "Muybridge was quite serious about obtaining views that would satisfy the documentary requirements of the commission, but that did not prevent him from pushing the conventions of landscape photogaraphy", Brookman, Muybridge in a Time of Change , p. 54.
  29. For more information, see Brookman, Muybridge in a Time of Change , p. 54.
  30. There are no references to the lighthouse photos, for example, in Rebecca Solnits River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (2003) or in Brian Clegg's The man who stopped time. The illuminating story of Eadweard Muybridge - pioneer photographer, father of the motion picture, murderer (2007).
  31. ↑ On this and the following cf. Braun: Eadweard Muybridge , p. 86f.
  32. According to Marta Braun's assessment, cf. Braun: Eadweard Muybridge , p. 87.
  33. A reproduction of the five stitches based on Muybridge's photos can be found in Hendricks, Eadweard Muybridge , Figure 57.
  34. There are contradicting information on the exact origin of Flora Downs. According to Brookman, she came from Alabama ( Muybridge in a Time of Change , p. 67). Rebecca Solnit, on the other hand, states that Downs is either from Kentucky or Ohio ( River of Shadows , p. 129).
  35. The first name of the son is given differently in the literature. Solnit ( River of Shadows , p. 127 and passim ) and Hendricks ( Eadweard Muybridge , p. 68 and passim) give the name as "Florado", while Braun ( Eadweard Muybridge , p. 91 and passim) and Brookman ( Muybridge in a Time of Change , p. 67 and passim) use the spelling “Floredo”. This article follows the writing of Hendricks, who provides by far the most detailed information about the child and also includes two photos of the fifty-six year old Florado in his presentation (p. 75, Figure 74 and 75).
  36. For more details on this, Solnit, River of Shadows , pp. 136–139.
  37. ^ Solnit, River of Shadows , 142.
  38. Brookman, Muybridge in a Time of Change , p. 70.
  39. Rebecca Solnit in: The Weird World of Eadweard Muybridge , BBC documentary from 2010, from minute 30.
  40. ^ Braun, Eadweard Muybridge , p. 107.
  41. ^ "[...] their examination renders it difficult to believe that [...] photography can make much further progress towards absolute perfection", Report of the Judges , Elevent Industrial Exhibition, San Francisco, 1876. Kingston Museum scrapbook, p. 18. Here quoted in Brookman, Muybridge in a Time of Change , p. 73.
  42. ↑ On this and the following cf. Solnit, River of Dreams , p. 157.
  43. ^ "[...] his mammoth-plate 1878 panorama is something of a farewell both to landscape photography and to the city it depicted. [...] this panorama, [...] signaled the end of Muybridge's work in the field and the real beginning of his work in the studio [...] ", Solnit, River of Dreams , p. 174.
  44. ^ "The result was a kind of panorama that had never been seen before; it seemed to obliterate the physical and temporal boundaries of the individual photographic plates while imposing its own challenges of viewing. ", Braun, Eadweard Muybridge , p. 125.
  45. ^ "[The panorama] is one of Muybridge's greatest accomplishments [...]. Because of its scale and unprecedented detail, it remains an unparalleled document of San Francisco before the 1906 earthquake changed its face forever. ", Brookman, Muybridge in a Time of Change , p. 76
  46. See Solnit, River of Dreams , p. 79.
  47. For more details on this, Solnit, River of Dreams , pp. 186–188.
  48. For more details on this, Braun, Eadweard Muybridge , pp. 136–142.
  49. "The feat performed by Muybridge [...] is second only, among the marvels of the age, to the wonderful discoveries of the telephone and phonograph.", Quoted here from Braun, Eadweard Muybridge , p. 143.
  50. ^ Brookman, Muybridge in a Time of Change , p. 84.
  51. ^ "The most careless observers of these figures will not fail to notice that the conventional figure of a trotting horse in motion does not appear in any of them, nor anything like it.", A Horse's Motion Scientifically Determined , in: Scientific American from October 19, 1878, quoted here from Brookman, Muybridge in a Time of Change , p. 143.
  52. ^ Brookman, Muybridge in a Time of Change , p. 87.
  53. ^ "Eakin's painting [...] is one of the very first to use Muybridge's studies as a model for the correct visual representation of horses in motion [...]", Brookman, Muybridge in a Time of Change , p. 88.
  54. ^ "The stimulus for this idea may have coe from the editor of the leading science magazine, Scientific American . [...] The editor commented in passing that it would be possible to cut out the pictures, paste them onto a strip of card, and re-animate them using a zoetrope. ", Clegg, The man who stopped time , p. 141.
  55. ^ "Unlike all previous devices, the zoopraxiscope represented original action captured by a battery of cameras.", Brookman, Muybridge in a Time of Change , p. 89.
  56. "Mr. Muybridge has laid the foundation of a new method of entertaining the people, and we predict that his instantaneous, photographic, magic lantern zoetrope will make the rounds of the civilized world. ”, Here quoted from Clegg, The man who stopped time , p. 152.
  57. For more information, see Brookman, Muybridge in a Time of Change , pp. 92f.
  58. detail the impact Muybridge: David Campany, moving with the times. Eadweard Muybridge I , in: Tate Etc. 20 (2010), last accessed on September 5, 2017.
  59. ^ "A diverse group of artists, from Frederic Remington to Edgar Degas, took note of his work as it continued to garner widespread attention, and they used it as an aid in modeling the correct positions of moving animals and humans in their work [... ] ", Brookman, Muybridge in a Time of Change , p. 97.
  60. ^ "Muybridge [...] is a seminal character in the history of photography", Braun, Eadweard Muybridge , p. 7.
  61. ^ A b Corey Kellner, Magnificent Entertainment: The Spectacular Eadweard Muybridge , in: Philip Brookman [et al.]: Eadweard Muybridge , London 2010, pp. 217–228, here p. 218.
  62. ^ Braun, Eadweard Muybridge , p. 7.
  63. "In addition to being a photographer of his day, he was a showman, entertainer, lecturer, animator, entrepreneur, inventor, venture capitalist and murderer [...]", Braun, Eadweard Muybridge , p. 7.
  64. Most prominently by Hendricks, who describes Muybridge in the title of his 1975 biography as "Father of the Motion Picture".
  65. ^ "Muybridge is often called the" father "of something, the father of motion pictures usually [...]", Solnit, River of Shadows , p. 242.
  66. ^ Braun, Eadweard Muybridge , p. 8.
  67. On this and the following Braun, Eadweard Muybridge , p. 9.
  68. On this exhibition cf. Karen Rosenberg, A Man Who Stopped Time to Set It in Motion Again , in: The New York Times on April 26, 2010, last accessed on September 29, 2017.
This article was added to the list of excellent articles on December 28, 2017 in this version .