Eadweard J. Muybridge
[Photography]  [A/H Index]  [^^TIME Line]

See also:  [Flying Gallop]
           [Stop Motion]
           [Art Techniques]
                  [TIME LINE] (just a snap-shot of an instant of space-time glued into a plastic resin)
           [Film]
           [^^Film] (film index to the FILMS directory)

           [post post-modernism]

On this page:  {Intro}
               
               {Refs}


Eadweard J. Muybridge

    (b. ; d.)
    
Well known is the idea of a bet as to whether when
a horse is in full gallop, do all four of its feet
leave the ground? See: -[Flying Gallop]-

The idea conceived by Muybridge was simple: Have
a horse gallop across along a path and as it does
so, have its feet break delicate trip wires which
would trigger cameras one-after-the-next to take
photos of the horse as it passed along the path.



So, in order to do stop motion he needed a set 
up like this: A blank wall along the left against
which to take the pictures as the horse strode
(galloped) by, and then the trip wires and their
cameras along with their house to hold them all.

After viewing the set up, and within five years,
Marey would have a portable "camera gun" that
could almost the same thing. See:  -[Stop Motion]-

As pointed out in [Frizot, P.244], the colodion process
then in use was too slow to "stop" motion. But,
what the photo-sensitive surface could not do,
the shutter could. Also not that Frizot reminds
us that to link this idea of sequential cameras
to "the invention of cinema (nearly twenty years
later), but that is a s psuedo-historical view of
events, directed by hindsight, and does not
correspond to the real objectives of the decisive
years 1875-1885, since none of them had looked
for, or een evisaged, that reconstitution of
visual reality that we call cinema."

 "... others had taken an interst in this problem:

    Louis Ducos du Hauron (in 1864),
    Cook and Bonelli (1863-1865)
    Entienne-Jules Marey (1884)
  & Heny Du Mont - who wrote:

      (1861 in his patent) People in 
      motion will be reproduced in all
      the phases of their movements,
      and with the interval of time 
      which really separated those 
      phases.  [Frizot, P. 245]

An important aspect of this last is, that the
motion of a person is NOT continuous and evenly
spaced: Throwing a discus is the clearest example
of this, since the wind up is quite rapid, and the
final un-flinging quite smooth - but, the body 
flow seems much slower at the last. And then of
course, the final pause and "follow through".
See: -[Stop Motion]-





This idea was NOT unique in that it had already been
established that stop-motion (a result of flash 
photography) could "freeze" the action of a scene.
This also gave rise to the concept of a "still" 
photo extracted from a film. See: -[Cindy Sherman]-

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Chronology


The Daguerreotype
                         

The Calotype




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References


Frizot, Michel(1998). A New History of Photography.   
        Milan: kOnemann.  ISBN 3.8290.1328.0, LCCN #

        This massive volume is treuly a book for the
        new milenium! Superbly readable, as well as
        a trove of "the classics" and rare photos.


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