Existing comment:
Eadweard Muybridge:
Animal Locomotion and the Modernist View:
Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) was a visionary photographer whose innovations in art and technology transformed late 19th-century American and European culture. As one of the first artists to fully understand the means of describing speed in relation to human and animal location, Muybridge imagined a synthesis of people and machines in his work. To do this, he developed new cameras and shutters that for the first time could stop rapid motion. His masterpiece, Animal Locomotion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movement, contains 781 plates made from almost 20,000 individual images, ordered hierarchically, to form an archive of human and animal actions.
Muybridge's real innovation was to dissect into sequences of still images arranged as a grid, and to reanimate these in some of the first projected moving pictures. His advances played an integral role in constructing a modernist view of the world, in which time and space can be analyzed and manipulated.
Quoted extensively by artists and scientists alike, Animal Locomotion has been almost continuously manifested in visual arts, photography, graphics, communications, and movies since its publication in 1887. This gallery examines Muybridge's influence on the development of Cubism, in which the subject was presented from multiple viewpoints imagined over an extended period of time. |