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THE COMPLEAT EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE: MUYBLOG JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2009
Muy blog Return to main page MARCH-APRIL 2009 CLICK HERE
JANUARY - FEBRUARY 2009
Go to Muyblog 2009 MARCH - APRIL
Brought to Light: A stop-motion successor
From the webpage: Modern Art Notes. Tyler Green's modern & contemporary art blog discusses a recent exhibition.
So fast forward exactly 100 years from Muybridge's experiments to 1972, when Eleanor Antin cleverly tweaked Muybridge's motion photography with her Carving: A Traditional Sculpture. Antin's project is one of the most famous conceptual pieces of the 20th-century: During a 37-day crash diet, Antin photographed herself four times a day and presented the results in grid form. [Image: A detail from the work, which is in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.]....Instead of using photography to capture too-quick-for-the-eye motion, Antin uses it to capture too-slow-for-the-eye motion.
Read more about this here.
Muybridge too technical for GCE A-level
I've just noticed that Muybridge has been dropped from the UK's present CCEA's (Council for the Curriculum Examination and Assessment) Advanced Subsidiary (AS) and Advanced (A) GCE History of Art specification (taught from September 2008.) The reasons for changes are listed, the final reason being:
The explanation continues:
So there we are then. 781 collotype locomotion plates not sufficient quantity? Does half a century of Muybridge work continuously in popular print suggest limited quality?
'Limited quantity and/or quality of critical literature'? Sorry Françoise Forster-Hahn, sorry Tom Gunning, sorry everyone else - just not good enough. Or maybe just not enough. OK, so perhaps some commentary needs updating, or isn't pitched for A-level. So commission some.
The irony is that I was watching The Genius of Photography the other night (BBC2 repeats of the 2007 series), and was pleased to see the recognition of Daguerre as someone who wanted to communicate images; the common factor between the giant paintings of the Diorama, and the daguerreotype - the beautiful, haunting, miraculous, aesthetically unique (but essentially technical) daguerreotype. And the huge numbers of students whose artworks - at every level - are currently being influenced by the Muybridge canon is extraordinary. Or have I misunderstood the reasons for dropping these two photographic giants? With Daguerre, is it the man or the process that's being dropped?
Oh well, say goodbye to Louis and Eadweard in the classroom, children. Perhaps now they're no longer part of the curriculum you'll appreciate them even more. Kewl.
(I don't understand why they were included in the first place - everyone knows that photography isn't art.)
COMMENTS:
This is outrageous, though I must admit my first reaction was surprise that Muybridge had ever been on the school curriculum. When was the History of Art ever so progressive? The "essentially technical" snub seems particularly perverse, but perhaps it's some sort of backhanded compliment - they recognise that Muybridge was more of a scientist than an artist...
The Triumph of Helios: Photographic Treasures of the California State Library
This 2006 exhibition catalogue is scarce, so it's especially pleasing to be able to report that the whole 32-page illustrated book is available as a
free pdf download (when you get to the page, click view preview), courtesy California State Library Foundation, Sacramento.
The Helios of the title isn't Muybridge - who adopted the name for his early photoraphy - but the sun. However, Muybridge is included.
More than 40 illustrations include several Muybridge works, including a rare stereograph of the Zoopraxoographical Hall from the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, and a montage by publishers Bradley & Rulofson containing a portrait of Muybridge (c.1871) that I haven't seen before.
American Express helps 2010 exhibition
Helios: The Art of Eadweard Muybridge, curated by Philip Brookman, Chief Curator and Head of Research, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., has been assisted by a grant from American Express. The exhibition opens in January 2010, and is due to move to the Tate Britain later in the year.
From the American Express website:
We support organizations and projects that preserve or rediscover important cultural works and major historic sites in order to provide ongoing access and enjoyment for current and future audiences. The programs we support include a broad range of arts and culture: from historic landmarks and public spaces to dance, theater, music, film and the visual arts. We emphasize preserving works that represent a range of diverse cultures.
Criteria:
* Ensuring public engagement with a restored work of art or historic site
CULTURAL HERITAGE
22 February 2009
YouTube videos based on Muybridge's work are being added frequently. Here's one that was produced for the British Film Institute.
(Directed by George Snow for the BFI)
TODAY'S FLICKR PHOTO: Marcus Melton video installation for the WTAMU faculty show 2009. "the machine (powered by muybridge)"
Muybridge and Zukor
Throughout the 20th century, Muybridge was usually hailed as 'the father' (or grandfather, or godfather) of motion pictures. When the first edition of Anita Ventura Mozley's exhibition catalogue Eadweard Muybridge : The Stanford Years 1872-1882 was published in 1972, some copies (perhaps 100) were numbered, and included a sheet of corrections, plus a tipped-in sheet commemorating the centennial of the birth of Adolph Zukor, the film magnate. Born Adolph Cukor in Hungary in 1873 - just when Muybridge was starting his 'horse in motion' experiments - Zukor had emigrated to America at the age of 16 in 1889, while Muybridge was still lecturing with his Zoopraxiscope.
Zukor entered the movie business (as a penny-peepshow proprietor) in 1903, later founding Famous Players, and Paramount Pictures. He retired from Paramount in 1959 and thereafter assumed Chairman Emeritus status. Unusually for centennial celebrations, the subject was still around to appreciate the event. My copy of the book (numbered 71) includes this sheet, which bears Zukor's actual manuscript signature. He died in 1976, at the age of 103.
Thought and Timing In the Round: Muybridge, Engel, Deleuze
Along with Sergei Eisenstein and Rosalind Krauss, Gilles Deleuze perceives animation at the level of single-frame technology and names all animation "cartoon." For Deleuze, there are conditions that determine cinema. His critique involving films previously positioned within the terrain of experimental animation is excavated in this paper and put forward as compelling critical thought to place experimental animation outside cinema. Deleuze is alert to the implications of Muybridge's "horse's gallop" as an historical change of status in movement in painting, dance, ballet and mime to release values that are not posed. Jules Engel's Accident (1973) is a two-fold work of lithography and experimental animation to equally assert this awareness in the history of art, cinema, and experimental animation. Aside from a surface language of animal locomotion, the primacy of the frame as a principle of timing acceleration, deceleration and variation is fulfilled in the collective Muybridge, Engel and Deleuze.
New 'Articles' section added to this site
A listing of 75+ articles has now been added
here. Both printed journal /magazine and web-based items are included. Where these are accessible online, a link has been provided. Articles in period (pe-1904) newspapers and photographic magazines are mostly not included at this time, but these can be found in the extensive Chronology. The list will contine to be developed.
COMMENTS:
The new Articles section is very welcome - helpfully (and consistently cited), and such a remarkable range of journals covered. As well as noting those articles which are freely available online, it would be helpful to include those which are online but only available through subscription or higher education resources. Luke McKernan.
The Domes from Merced River, Yosemite Valley, Edward Muybridge, c.1872.
Miwok village reconstruction (based on Muybridge photos): Wrong tribe honoured at Yosemite?
The following is the conclusion of a story on the Indian Country Today website.
...if you were visiting the Yosemite Indian Village and store, and if you didn't know the history of the early Native Americans of the Yosemite Valley you would be fooled into thinking that the Park honors the original Indians, but you would be mistaken. Not only did they honor the scouts for the white military, but they removed Chief Tenaya. Not once in the Yosemite Indian Village is Chief Tenaya, who bravely stood his ground and refused to sign any treaty with the whites, mentioned, but you will find the Indian scouts of the white militia who forced the original Indians out of Yosemite praised. The same scouts who were afraid to enter Yosemite Valley. Their tribal name and language is prominently enshrined with a make believe pre-contact Miwok village, which incidentally was patterned after Paiute photos taken by Edweard Muybridge the famous British photographer.
No mention of Chief Tenaya. No Paiute and Mono language that was spoken by Tenaya and his band in the Indian Village. Instead Yosemite National Park honors the white militia's Indian scouts as the "original Indians of Yosemite". This is a true injustice. I guess in their minds all Native Americans resemble another, but we Indians know better....
More from Indian Country Today.
TODAY'S FLICKR PHOTO: Gun_D
'Professor' Stanley Unwin - who would have appreciated this nonsense.
Bot poetry?
The ceation of blogs that comprise chunks of material farmed almost at random from the web - I believe it's called 'scraping' - simply in order to create a webpage with advertisements leading to commercial products, has resulted in some rather engaging near-nonsense text, some of which is reminiscent of the gobbledegook spoken so eloquently by the late 'Professor' Stanley Unwin.
The subject of Muybridge is not exempt. I particularly like the blog page
here, which leads to an Amazon advertisement for the Dover book Animals in Motion, and was apparently 'translated' by Babelfish or a similar service:
Muybridge not one and only discovered that horses gallop near no foot pitiful the floorboards, but his uncovering lead to motion pictures, where on earth his photo be a remarkably crude edition of make obvious today. There be gutturally 4,000 photos here assortment...
Now - it seems that this blog does not belong to a real person (perhaps it was set up by a 'bot') - so who is responsible? Amazon? Google? (There are some Google ads on the page). Or....? I'm not sufficiently web-savvy to know what's going on here, but I can appreciate the result.
Oh yes! Furthermore....
And finally....
Deep joy.
OCCIDENT print, Currier and Ives
Occident print - based on Muybridge's photographs?
The photographs of Leland Stanford's horse Occident supposedly taken by Muybridge in 1872 have yet to be discovered, as has any solid evidence for them having been taken. The 1873 photographs, reported at the time, have also not been found. In an essay published in 1972 [1], Robert Haas suggests, "It is likely that the Currier and Ives print, "The California Wonder OCCIDENT, owned by Gov. L. Stanford," entered for copyright in 1873, was intended to make both the photographs and the results of the experiments visual. As translated to the lithographic stone by equestrian artist J. Cameron, Occident displays himself in harness, at the private trial of speed, with all four feet free of the ground."
The same essay also shows a similar Currier and Ives lithograph of Occident, by artist Thomas Worth, dated 1876: Haas states - "It is probable that a Muybridge photograph of 1876 (as yet undiscovered) ...supplied the image."
By the time Haas's book was published [2], the 1876 print is omitted, and the suggestion concerning the 1873 print has been slightly modified: "it is likely" (that the print was informed by Muybridge's photographs) has become the less confident "it is possible".
In fact, the pose shown in both prints (see the 1873 print above), with all four hooves off the ground, had been used for many years by equine artists, including those whose lithographs were published by Currier & Ives.
The 1853 Nathaniel Currier (pre-Currier & Ives) print Flora Temple shows the same pose almost exactly, and with all feet raised from the ground.
The 1867 print Ethan Allen and Mate and Dexter also shows the same leg positioning, and again the hooves are off the ground. This depiction of 'unsupported transit' was actually fairly standard long before Muybridge's photographs. Perhaps the depictions in these earlier engravings were the source of the debate that Stanford decided to settle. If Muybridge's photographs were indeed used as reference material for the 1873 print by Cameron, the result (in terms of positioning of the horse and its limbs) nevertheless looked like many other prints of similar subjects published earlier. Doubters would not have been convinced. When Muybridge later published an 'Automatic Electro-Photograph' image of Occident in motion in 1877 - as a single card entitled 'The Horse in Motion' (a precursor of an 1878 six-card set with the same series title), it was a photographic copy of a collage - more paint than photo. [3] Doubts were expressed - and eventually series photographs, relatively unretouched, were published.
This manipulation of images was an attempt to provide unambiguous visual material, as explained by Phillip Prodger and Tom Gunning. [3]
An example of the 1873 Currier & Ives print is currently on eBay.com - Item number: 250367509530. (With thanks to Lynn at 'Cherry-Pickers')
[1] Robert Bartlett Haas, Eadweard Muybridge, 1830-1904, in: Anita Ventura Mozley's Eadweard Muybridge. The Stanford Years 1872-1882 (1972)
[2] Robert Bartlett Haas, Muybridge: Man in Motion (1976). Beware of the three illustrations on p. 97 - the captions are in the wrong order.
[3] For a reproduction of the 1877 card, and an explanation of the collage artworks from which it derived, see Phillip Prodger's Time Stands Still. Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement (2003), 'Make it Stop', p.143-147, and Tom Gunning's chapter 'Never Seen This Picture Before', especially pp.245-246.
Detail from Animal Locomotion Plate 489
"I never made no such photographs."
Waves and Light Matter: Essays
Chapter One
"You will simply climb one side of the ladder until you reach its top, at a natural speed, don't hurry, and then at the top pose - so," and Eadweard Muybridge, in his graying frowzled garden-of-a-beard and eternally-on-him-whether-out-of-doors-or-in black crumpled Amish-look surveyor's hat, swings one leg grandly in back of himself, and lifts his arms and puffed-up chest aspiringly upward, with the full effect of a ballerina's kick cum Viking dragon prow, "and count to five, and then simply climb back down. Do you see?"
"And I will be undressed?"
"And you will be undressed."
There's silence now in this building on the well-trimmed Pennsylvania University grounds. He fancies he can hear the light in its ceaseless lap against the outside walls - his light, his wrought gold that he captures and condenses like an alchemist in an alembic.
"Elsie - " What to say? She's new. A friend of the provost's daughter. She's the only model who's shown so far today, and the cameras he'd swear are lowly purring in impatience to be used.
He nods at one of them now, his lovely four-foot box with its thirteen Dallmeyer lenses. "I will be here with the camera, Elsie, fully forty-nine feet away from the ladder."
If this reassures her, there's no visible sign. She knows this is "important," that it's "Art" or "Science" or some such term come down to touch her life from where it's been carved on a marble entablature, and yet ... and yet ... What tale will she tell them, when she returns to her day at the folding-line of Pryor's Manufactory Cottons?
"Dozens have preceded you, Elsie, women, men, all - " He has an idea. "This," and he unties the leather cover of an album and removes two sheets of developed images, "this will either send you fleeing in horror, or convince you of the ... naturalness with which we view the project."
One is eighteen sequenced shots of Athlete swinging a pick, and one is forty-four of Model No. 95, ex-athlete, aged about sixty, ascending and descending incline, and bearing a fifty-pound weight in twenty-two of these snaps. The man is naked. The man is Muybridge, chuckling now over his sixty-two tiny selves.
"You see?"
"But Mr. Muybridge," she says - is there a nascent twinkle in her eye? - "when you was a-posin' for these ... ?"
"Yes, Elsie?"
"... sir, I wasn't behind the camera." And then the both of them, chuckling. She milks the joke of her sly observation. "I never made no such photographs."
"Elsie ..." He fully undoes the album, and then two more, and fans a hundred sheets across the table, selecting some, pointing in rapid succession at his astonishing serial studies, naked men at cricket, boxing, fencing, horseback riding, naked women running, somersaulting, rolling hoops with sticks, a trotting camel on loan from the Pennsylvania Zoo, a greyhound, a milk-white parrot in flight, more naked men (one pugilist feigns a knockout), a deer, a woman performing jumping jacks, and all of them immediately blinking out of themselves and into their next selves ...
"... nobody, nobody, has ever made such photographs."
Copyright © 1999 Albert Goldbarth. All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-8203-2126-5
A panel from 'The Life of Eadweard Muybridge "Grandfather of Motion Pictures"', in Camera Comics No.4, Spring 1945, U.S. Camera Publishing Corporation, Chicago, Illinois.
Camera Comics: The Life of Eadweard Muybridge, "Grandfather of Motion Pictures"
There are many graphic representations of Muybridge's horse photography, and even a four-page biography of Muybridge himself; 'Grandfather of Motion Pictures', in the comic book Camera Comics no. 4 (US Camera Publishing Corporation, 1945). The story concentrates on his sequence photography and projection of 'motion pictures' with the Zoopraxiscope, showing a clean-shaven Eadweard - the writer no doubt considering that the young men who were the target audience for this publication would have difficulty in identifying with a grey-bearded old geezer - and no mention of the dramatic killing of his wife's lover. This omission is intriguing and not apparently due to any sensibilities of the publisher over violence - there's plenty of wartime killing throughout the rest of the comic - but perhaps the delicate nature of the reason for the shooting was deemed unsuitable. One panel shows a projected image of a horse galloping - and ironically, the artist has depicted the animal in the traditional 'rocking-horse' position disproved by Muybridge's photographs. The story concludes with the unveiling of a centenary plaque in 1931 but Muybridge's birthplace of Kingston-on-Thames, correctly stated in an earlier panel, has now become 'Upton-on-Thames'. An admirer remarks, in what is presumably supposed to be a local Surrey accent, "Aye, he was a great man!". The nature of Muybridge's life and work cries out for a modern graphic novel interpretation.
The four-page comicbook story may now be Downloaded here.
Muybridge's Guatemalan Laundresses: Gender, Labor, and Aesthetics on a Coffee Plantation
Now there's an attention-grabbing title for a lecture! Great to see this focus on these aspects of Muybridge's Central American photographs.
..........................................................................................................................................
Also on the subject of Muybridge's work in Guatemala and Panama, here's a pdf download of the attractive brochure for the Smithsonian American Art Museum's 2007 exhibition Eadweard Muybridge - The Central American Journey.
Magic Windows: Historic photographs aid geologic studies
Following on from this week's blog entry Who painted the discs? - much of which concerned Muybridge's artist collaborator Erwin Faber and biological drawings based on photographs, here's another use of drawings used to aid science; this time geology. It's relevant to our blog because Muybridge consistently used different media - drawing, painting, collage - to clarify his photographic evidence, when publishing his analysis work, and also because this particular device makes use of historic travel photographs by (amongst others) - Muybridge.
We needed to find a way to help students think about the processes of geologic change during their field program at Point Bonita in the Marin Headlands. This meant that the teaching tools we developed needed to be suitable for an outdoor program: inexpensive, portable (can fit into a day pack), durable, and able to withstand exposure to varying weather conditions.
The archives of Point Bonita are rich in historic photos, including some wonderful photographs taken by Eadweard Muybridge. The peninsula is exposed to occasional violent storms - landslides are common. The historic photos document 150 years of human interaction with a dynamic landscape with plenty of evidence of erosion and weathering of rocks.
For many years, rangers and lighthouse docents have successfully used a selection of historic photos during tours to illustrate aspects of Point Bonita's history. Our challenge was to find a way to illustrate geologic processes through historic and contemporary photos. We considered ways to create an "overlay" effect as you looked at a particular view...
There's much more on the webiste of the
National Park Service - US Department of the Interior.
Eadweard Muybridge's Effect on Toy Industry Unsurprisingly Unprofound
By Jeremiah McNichols Email January 28, 2009 | 7:00:00 AM
It may not strike you as odd that Eadweard Muybridge's famous photographic depictions of the real movements made by a wide array of species wouldn't quite make it to the design desks of the world's cheapest toymakers, but shouldn't museums know to check a reference when positioning an animal?
The New York Times is ready to set the record straight once and for all.
Read Jeremiah McNichols' blog
, and link to the NYT article.
Who painted the discs?
One of the many mysteries concerning Muybridge and his work is: who painted the Zoopraxiscope discs? It wasn't Muybridge himself - such painting is very specialist work. We know the artist responsible for the colour discs (more on that later) but they may never have been projected - or if they were, not until 1893. We don't know who painted the b&w discs; the ones that are the subject of all known reviews of Muybridge's presentations. The b&w discs were not all produced together. Some were created at the same time as the Zoogyroscope/Zoopraxiscope projector in 1879-80, others two or three years later, and some after the 1885-86 sequence photography. It's possible that in an archive somewhere there are letters between Muybridge and the artist/s, but nothing has yet come to light.
In the 1870s, the firm of C.W. Briggs and Co. (by 1874 they were in Philadelphia) used the services of, amongst others, Hermann Faber to produce designs for their lantern slides, which were photographically printed from negatives, then coloured by hand.
Hermann Faber's son Erwin followed in his father's profession as a graphic artist. From surviving letters, we know that it was Erwin who created the drawings for the coloured discs of 1892-94, working closely with Muybridge who almost certainly arranged the sequences (many of which required combinations of images.) For more than 20 years, Erwin was instructor in pathological drawing in the Medical School, University of Pennsylvania. The New York Times later noted that Erwin, his brother Ludwig and their father 'worked for twelve years illustrating the "human anatomy" of the late Professor George A. Pearson' - these were presumably lecture illustrations.[1]
Their work was admired within the field. In 1897 the Saint Louis Medical and Surgical Journal [Page 285] noted: "...Hermann and Erwin F. Faber, two artists who have reproduced the appearances presented with a faithfulness but rarely seen."
For decades, Erwin Faber's output was prolific, with many hundreds of his drawings appearing in biological handbooks. John A. Kolmer's Practical text-book of infection, immunity, and biologic therapy[2], contained 202 of his original illustrations, 51 in colour. (3rd edn c.1923).
One volume by Gwillm G. Davis - Applied Anatomy. The Construction of the Human Body considered in relation to its Functions, Diseases, and Injuries (J.B. Lippincott, fifth edition 1918) included no less than 631 of his meticulously drawn figures; again, many in colour. Such drawings were the standard method of reproducing illustrations in scientific publications, and are still used today. Often informed by photography, the interpretation of the artist provided, in many cases, a much clearer illustration than reproduction of a photograph could give. This widespread acceptance of scientific drawings with a photographic origin as valid representations may have contributed to Muybridge's decision to use this production method for the coloured discs, but he later came to regret it.
At least one illustration, Fig.499 Walking, was based on a photographic sequence from Muybridge's Animal Locomotion - apparently Plate 467: Child walking, although the images don't match exactly.
This impressive output puts one in mind of Muybridge's own relentless work; Erwin Faber would have been well suited to the task of drawing the large number of separate images needed for the coloured discs.
The 50 drawings used for the paper 'Zoopraxiscope discs' (phenakistiscopes) intended for sale at the 1893 World's Fair at Chicago were also by Erwin Faber.
Of the 12 coloured subjects (on paper), only four different examples are known to exist, in the Library of Congress, shown here. A very small number of examples of the b/w paper discs and one or two of the colour paper discs exist in private collections.
The very few surviving examples indicate that they did not sell well at the Exposition, and ironically more people will have seen the waltzing couple animated on the web, than ever saw the originals in 1893.
Erwin Faber's illustrations were appearing in print well into the 1930s [3]
Erwin F. Faber died in May 1939; his passing was noted in the New York Times. More about the Faber/Muybridge correspondence appears in Eadweard Muybridge: The Kingston Museum Bequest
So the question still remains - who painted the black-and-white discs - the ones that delighted audiences in Europe and America for more than a decade?
[1[ New York Times 25 May, 1939
Imagemakers of the Modoc War: Louis Heller and Eadweard Muybridge
University of California, Merced Library
The important article 'Imagemakers of the Modoc War: Louis Heller and Eadweard Muybridge', by Peter Palmquist, (Humboldt State University) is now available free online. Download from here (PDF format).
Nearly 100 Modoc War photographs are known to exist. These photographs range from carte de viste style portraits of the Modoc Indian prisoners to stereographs of the warsite topography, the military encampments, the participants, and the military hardware. Curiously, these remarkable images have never been studied as a group, nor have the circumstances of their origin been explored in depth. For most writers who have dealt with the conflict, there has been one simple assumption: "Eadweard J. Muybridge took the Modoc War photographs." This paper will show that such is not the case, and that an almost forgotten photographer, Louis H. Heller, deserves equal credit with Muybridge for coverage of the Modoc War. A catalogue of Modoc War images is presented at the end of this paper, followed by a representative series of images by the photographers (Plates 1-33).
Peter Palmquist (1977) "Imagemakers of the Modoc War: Louis Heller and Eadweard Muybridge", The Journal of California Anthropology: Vol. 4: No. 2, Article 7.
Stereoscopic Views - 170 online
There are now 170 of Muybridge's stereoscopic views of the Yosemite Valley and Pacific Coast viewable from one online source, courtesy of NYPL. See these examples from the huge Robert N. Dennis collection of stereoscopic views, Humanities and Social Sciences Library: Photography Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, New York Public Library.
Many hundreds of Muybridge's photographs are viewable on the web, the best sources are accessible from our LINKS page.
Studies in Motion - the book of the play
It seems that there is a new book based on the theatre production Studies in Motion - the Hauntings of Eadweard Muybridge. The book, Studies in Motion, by Kevin Kerr, was originally listed for publication in September 2008. Recent listings (Amazon.com) state December 2008. I haven't yet read any blog entries or reviews, so it may not have actually appeared yet - but orders are being taken. More news as it develops.
In the meantime, the play is set for several dates in Canada, and there's a new poster.
This is from the book publisher's website:
On the surface, these sequences of still photos signify a person committed to the emerging culture of modern science: understanding through controlled observation and rational analysis, using the potential of technology to transcend the limits of our own senses, to enhance our powers of perception. Women and men, usually nude, are presented performing "everyday" actions alongside movements that are ritualistic, comic, sensual, absurd, and even diseased and pathological. The variations seem endless. There is a tension in the collected images: scientific, classical, elegant, erotic, startling, disturbing and grotesque.
But taken together, particularly as the technology pioneered by Muybridge lead to the world of cinematography, they seem to say something else - to inescapably construct a narrative that has shaped our culture into one that objectifies human beings, where information is fragmented, mediated, where observations through the filter of technology are trusted more than those acquired directly through our physical senses, and set images into motion in the service of a public manipulation of perception as effectively as Muybridge himself used them in the revision of his own private mythology.
ISBN: 0889225923 - ISBN: 978-0-89922-592-3
Events:
Alberta - Calgary, Apr. 21, 2009: Studies in Motion at Alberta Theatre Projects
British Columbia - Vancouver, Apr. 01, 2009: Studies in Motion on the Stage
Review:
23 January 2009 [blog entry date]
Getty Lecture: Carleton Watkins and the Element of Time
Time: 4:00 PM
More information
Stacey Steers: Phantom Canyon, New York
Stacey Steers: Phantom Canyon (Video installation)
Stacey Steers' animated film Phantom Canyon was created from over four thousand handmade collages incorporating the images from Eadweard Muybridge's famous series of photographs from 1887.
The process used to create this beautiful and fantastic film is incredibly labor-intensive. Steers makes a hand-painted drawing or collage for each frame, which she then photographs on an old animation stand using 35mm film. Because it takes eight frames to create each second of animation, the film ends up taking years to complete.
The artists explains: "Over time I have come to see these working materials as a formal record of my ongoing and obsessive engagement with an original idea, through all its transformations. Phantom Canyon, my latest project, is an expoloration of a pivotal journey taken years ago. The film circumnavigates this experience and is a personal meditation on my own process of reflection and interpretation."
"Obsessive engagement..." now who does that remind you of?
About the film.
Bacon / Muybridge, Dublin 13 January - 3 May
Francis Bacon Studio Display Cases
The work of pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge was of crucial importance and of enormous interest to Francis Bacon. Muybridge's photographs provided Bacon with an encyclopaedic range of poses from which to draw for the artist's
increasingly ambitious figure painting.
http://www.hughlane.ie/collections_detail.php?id=258&tf=current
[link] Schematic Drawing for Muybridge II (1964)
Sol LeWitt and Muybridge
The American artist Sol LeWitt (September 9, 1928 - April 8, 2007) was linked to various movements, including Conceptual art and Minimalism. LeWitt rose to fame in the late 1960s with his wall drawings and "structures" (a term he preferred instead of "sculptures") but was prolific in a wide range of media including drawing, printmaking, and painting.
Oral history interview with artist Sol LeWitt
July 15, 1974
The following is an extract from an oral history interview conducted by Paul Cummings as part of the California Oral History Project for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
MR. CUMMINGS: Are you interested in film?
MR. LEWITT: Sure, I think, in a purely - not in a serious way, but I watch films on T.V. a lot. I think it's a really great means of expression. That's the other arm of Abstract Art. It's what happened to Representational Art. It became photographs, or film.
MR. CUMMINGS: All the galleries around the country are showing photographs coming up out of everywhere.
MR. LEWITT: I know. One of the biggest influences was when I first came to New York, a friend of mine living in New York for some time had gotten this from an old artist who had died, and he had a first edition Muybridge.
MR. CUMMINGS: Oh, really?
MR. LEWITT: I borrowed it. I should return it. I hate to return it. I was always turned on to Muybridge. After, the still life paintings evolved into little figures that I took out of Muybridge. I had one figure in each painting. Then it always became the same one of the man somersaulting. I think that Muybridge was really the biggest influence on my art of any older artist.
MR. CUMMINGS: What do you think the appeal was to you in his photographs?
MR. LEWITT: The logic of the surreal image was the important thing to me. At first it was the image, but then it became the fact of seeing things from three different angles, as they emerged and changed. It had a beginning and an ending. A kind of philosophical realism.
MR. CUMMINGS: All of the theories were active, reaching, or stepping, or jumping, moving.
MR. LEWITT: He called his work a figure in action, in motion, or animals in motion. Of course they were still photographs.
MR. CUMMINGS: He could line them up. It was just like the old flipbooks.
MR. LEWITT: It was right on the edge of photography and motion pictures.
MR. CUMMINGS: Did you ever make photographs like that?
MR. LEWITT: I did a few pieces using photographs. Well, there were two: they were called Muybridge 1 and Muybridge 2. The first one I had, I made a box which was about ten feet long, one foot high and about one foot, ten inches deep. They were made into ten compartments each, into the full room of the box. In each I had a photograph of a model walking towards the viewer. Muybridge always had them going at a perpendicular angle. But this one was walking directly towards the viewer. One, she was walking; the other, she was just sitting in a chair. It was a process of enlargement, using a same type of model. I did a couple others. A figure seen from four sides in a box. These were done about 1964. But those were the only things I did specifically using photographs.
This transcript is in the public domain and may be used without permission. Oral history interview with Sol Lewitt, 1974 July 15, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
[NOTE added 26 Jan 09]: Censorship controversy here:
Bernard Alfieri, photographer of Muybridge artefacts
The Eadweard Muybridge Collection at Kingston includes a number of photographic prints of the Zoopraxiscope and discs, taken by Bernard Alfieri (in the 1930s or 40s?) Alfieri was a prolific writer of popular books on photography, cameras, and how to sell photographs, including All about Cameras and how to choose yours (1949), The Miniature Manual (Link House Publications, 1949), and Photographing Machinery (Focal Press, 1948). One of his own photographs indicates an interest in instantaneous photography. Bernard Alfieri's father, also Bernard Alfieri, had been a founder member of the Linked Ring Brotherhood (the successionist group of pictorial photographers formed around 1890) and author of Half-Holidays with the Camera (W. B. Whittingham & Co, [1893]).
Alfieri (the Younger) had an article published in Courier ('Britain's Finest Magazine') in 1961, entitled 'Eadweard Muybridge. The real father of cinematography' [DOWNLOAD pdf]
[Note: 9 Feb 2009. Bernard Alfieri had an article entitled The Work of Eadweard Muybridge, in the
American Annual of Photography 1950 Vol 64 (American Photography, Minneapolis, 1949). This was a different text to the later Courier article. Note also that the photograph shown here in the blog is attributed to Alfieri, but was not one of those published in his two articles.]
For those of us who were tentatively groping around with using the web in the 1995/96 period, the expansion of what's possible (technically) and what's online is amazing. At that time Paul Hill, the then Curator at Kingston upon Thames Museum, was keen to get some Muybridge pages added to the web. I helped with some pictures - I remember taking my undeveloped 35mm film into Boots at Waterloo station, where they were offering the newfangled service of copying the images onto 'Photo-CD'. With the help of a young net-savvy technical bod (at Kingston University) the 'website' went online (late '95 or early '96?) with a few very grainy stills; which was exciting enough - at that time, I had never seen a moving image on the web. The old Kingston Muybridge pages have long since been superseded by a comprehensive Muybridge section on the Museum's current site, but some of those old pages (voted a 'cool site' in 1997, and last updated January 1998) are still floating around on the web, and a number of the pix that we used have been 'farmed' by other websites.
An unrelated and more ambitious Muybridge website was set up in 1995 by Michael Linder, which he described recently:
The first GIF animation program had just come out and the notion of actually animating images was as exciting then as the later arrival of streaming video and Flash movies. It seemed a miracle at the time.
I'd always been interested in Muybridge's photography for its iconic value. There was something significant to me in the gridline images of people and animals in motion that seemed a mix of poetry and science. A few years earlier, a friend had given me a book of Muybridge images and the idea of actually seeing these still sequences move once more was too intriguing to pass up.
I believe I was the first person to animate the images and put them on the Internet. I'd never before seen them actually move in any medium, though I'm at a loss to explain the reason why. After my site premiered, there was enormous interest in Muybridge's work and I was deluged with email from filmmakers and advertising agencies looking for guidance on copyright issues. My research indicated all the images are now in the public domain.
To me, Eadweard Muybridge was a new media maker for his day, and I was inspired by the parallels in his innovative use of photography. It seemed a perfect echo of the thrill and excitement of the early days of the Internet. Were there lessons for us to learn from Muybridge's work? That's what I wanted to learn as I researched his life.
As new technologies came along, I applied them - just as Muybridge moved from stereopticon photography to photo journalism to panoramas and motion. The first tools that allowed stitching of panoramas allowed me to recreate what I believe would have been Muybridge's vision from a century earlier.
The wild, adventuresome live Muybridge lived was equally fascinating and I proposed a movie about his life to the U.S. public broadcasting network, PBS. They declined, but I'm still fascinated by the idea of seeing a modern recreation of Muybridge's galloping horse experiments. Perhaps some day...
...I am so delighted that a new generation, just opening their eyes to the wonders of imaging, will have an opportunity to be exposed to this media pioneer."
Some of Michael Linder's early website pages are still around. (And: there have been at least two 'recreations' of Muybridge's galloping horse experiments.)
[16 Jan 09 Note: Michael tells me that his site was nominated for a Webby award for Best Graphic Design in the very first Webby competition, held in Eadweard's adoptive hometown San Francisco in 1996.]
Splendid Grief: Darren Waterston and the Afterlife of Leland Stanford Jr.
from artdaily.org, Friday 9 Jan 2009:
"Despite their reputation for emotional restraint, Victorians indulged in complex and elaborate rituals surrounding death and mourning," said Hilarie Faberman, the Center's curator of modern and contemporary art. "No better example is the case of Leland Stanford Jr., the only child of Leland and Jane Stanford, who died at the tender age of 15 from typhoid fever. The Stanfords' immense loss became the impetus for several commissioned monuments and works of art that perpetuated their son's memory. One of these splendid memorials was the Leland Stanford Jr. Museum that was founded at the same time as the university that bears young Stanford's name. 'Splendid Grief' examines the Stanford Family's elaborate displays of sorrow seen through the eyes of contemporary painter and installation artist Darren Waterston."
Waterston transforms the Ruth Levison Halperin Gallery into a mourning parlor that serves as a memento mori to the late Leland Jr. This installation includes objects from the museum's collection dealing with Leland's short life, such as Eadweard Muybridge's photograph "Leland Jr. on His Pony."
http://www.artdaily.com/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=27899
Memorials, Commemorative locations
A page of memorial plaques, commemoratives, and photographs of this statue has been added today.
Muybridge - A Sequence in Time
This is Frances Benjamin Johnston (1864-1952), feisty American photographer. An archive of her works contains two portraits of Muybridge, from the 1890s. Johnston travelled to Europe to take photographs of the famous, so the location of the sitting by Muybridge is difficult to establish. The two images are included in a gallery of photographic studio portraits of Muybridge, with supporting information, now added to this website.
New Paintings - Michael Milburn Foster
The artist Michael Milburn Foster is now working on a further series of six paintings inspired by Muybridge images: MUYBRIDGE Work in Progress 2. Preliminary sketches for two of the works are reproduced here. The painter has been mentioned on this blog before: His website is here.
Here's to Your Health for 2009! - and Welcome to the revamped Muybridge site. It's now easier to navigate, and has a growing number of resources:
BIBLIOGRAPHY
MORE LINKS Check back to the blog at least once a week - for Muybridge news, research developments, events, opinionated comment, and the usual bad-tempered correction of errors found in published material.
Muy blog email: Stephen Herbert
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