Eadweard Muybridge: Artistic Style & Methods

Muybridge's career spanned two very different photographic worlds, and he mastered each in turn. His early reputation rested on large-format landscape work, made with cumbersome glass-plate cameras carried into the Yosemite Valley and along the Pacific coast. To capture skies that ordinary wet-plate emulsions rendered as blank white, he printed clouds from separate negatives and devised a special "sky shade," producing dramatic, fully tonal landscapes that distinguished his views from those of his rivals.

The motion studies demanded an entirely new approach. To freeze a galloping horse, Muybridge arranged a long bank of cameras in a row beside the track, each with a fast mechanical shutter. As the horse ran past, it broke threads or electrical contacts that tripped the shutters in sequence, yielding a series of separate exposures spaced fractions of a second apart. The technique—later called chronophotography—recorded phases of movement far too rapid for the eye to follow.

At the University of Pennsylvania, Muybridge refined the system into a rigorous laboratory method. Subjects moved against a marked grid background, photographed simultaneously from multiple angles by batteries of cameras, so that a single action could be studied from the front, side, and rear at once. The grid lent the images their distinctive scientific appearance and allowed precise measurement of the body's positions through a stride or a stair-step.

To turn these still sequences back into movement, Muybridge built the zoopraxiscope in 1879. Because photographs printed around the rim of a spinning disc would appear compressed when rotated, he had the figures redrawn in elongated form, then projected them so that a painted horse appeared to trot or a man to somersault across the screen. It was among the first machines to project the illusion of motion to an audience.

Muybridge published his work as much for artists and scientists as for the public. The 781 plates of Animal Locomotion were issued as fine collotypes, and his later books arranged the sequences in tidy gridded panels, giving painters, sculptors, anatomists, and physiologists an unprecedented atlas of how living bodies actually move.