Video: Watch some of Eadweard Muybridge’s work and see how his pioneering efforts are influencing modern artists
In 1899, Eadweard Muybridge decided to put his house in order. After a life as remarkable as his, he had to consider how he would be remembered. Would it be for his revelatory sequences of photographs that so brilliantly captured the motion of animals? Would it be as the jealous husband who shot his wife’s lover? Or would he be remembered as the whiskery showman who delighted packed houses with his uncannily lifelike moving pictures? Muybridge wanted to go down in history as a man whose photographs had made a serious contribution to science. And so he instructed that his painstakingly produced glass discs, which had brought animals and people to life in halls and theatres around the world, should be smashed to smithereens.
“NOTHING was wanting but the clatter of hoofs upon the turf and an occasional breath of steam from the nostrils, to make the spectator believe that he had before him genuine flesh-and-blood steeds,” proclaimed The San Francisco Call on 5 May 1880. The previous evening its reporter had watched enthralled as Eadweard Muybridge gave the first public showing of his “zoopraxiscope”.
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The zoopraxiscope was Muybridge’s latest invention. After two years deconstructing the movement of animals with his pioneering freeze-frame photographic sequences, he was now able to reconstruct that motion to make a life-size horse trot across a big screen. Seduced by the audience’s wonderment, Muybridge soon took his show on the road: the high-minded photographer was about to become a popular entertainer whose moving-picture shows would play to packed houses.
Muybridge was already famous in California. He had left England for America in 1852 as Edward Muggeridge and set up as a bookseller in San Francisco. That might have been as interesting as things got if he hadn’t suffered a serious head injury in a stagecoach accident in 1860. He went home to England and returned six years later a different man. He had become excitable, inventive and creative, a change now attributed to his head injury. Along with his new personality he had a new profession – photographer.
As “Helios the Flying Studio” he won immediate acclaim for his magnificent landscapes, travelling the back country in a wagon purpose-built to carry his cumbersome cameras, plates and chemicals. The US Geological Survey and the US Army were so impressed that they hired him to record their activities in the American West. Then in 1872, Leland Stanford, railroad magnate, former governor of California and racehorse breeder, hired Muybridge, as he now called himself, to photograph his horse Occident at a racing trot. Muybridge experimented with ever-faster shutters until in 1877 he finally got a half-decent picture with an exposure of less than a thousandth of a second – an astonishing speed with such primitive equipment.
Stanford would have had his photograph sooner if Muybridge hadn’t killed a man mid-project. In 1874, Muybridge discovered his wife had a lover and shot him. He was tried for murder but acquitted by a jury who thought the killing justified. Free but with his wife pressing for divorce and alimony, he decided to photograph South America.
A year later, Muybridge’s wife died and he returned to California. Impressed by the picture of Occident at full tilt, Stanford sponsored the first of Muybridge’s celebrated motion-capture experiments. They began as an attempt to answer the “trot question”: did a trotting horse ever take all its feet off the ground at once? Muybridge placed a series of 12 cameras alongside a track and as the horse trotted past them it broke a series of tripwires, triggering each shutter in turn. The whole sequence took less than a second and the images showed that there was indeed a split second when the horse was airborne.
Increasing the number of cameras and swapping tripwires for automatic timers, Muybridge repeated the experiment, capturing the motion of galloping horses, speeding greyhounds and men as they ran, jumped, wrestled and turned somersaults. For anatomists and medical men, the photos were an invaluable record of the mechanics of movement. Artists were fascinated too, for the photos showed what the eye couldn’t see. A galloping horse, for instance, did not fly over the ground with legs extended front and back as so often depicted, but with its hooves tucked under its belly. A few were sceptical and questioned the accuracy of the sequences. “Some individual images in a sequence look distinctly odd, with limbs in unexpected attitudes, but if you animate them the movement is obviously right,” says Stephen Herbert, a historian of optical media. But Muybridge didn’t have the technology to make his images move – he had to invent it.
The zoopraxiscope was a sophisticated projector that had a rotating glass “picture disc” and a shutter disc spinning in the opposite direction. As the discs turned, the sequence of pictures appeared on the screen as a single moving image. With the lights down and the projector’s lamp lit, the operator turned a handle and a succession of animals pranced across the screen. The effect was stunning.
Although Muybridge gave the impression that what appeared on the disc was a set of his famous photos, a technical quirk of the machine created a problem. If Muybridge projected his photographs onto a large screen they appeared unnaturally tall and thin, so instead he made a set of prints, calculated how they should be bent and angled to counter the distortion, and rephotographed them. Now the animals appeared squat and elongated. Rather than print these poor-quality photos on the discs, he hired an artist to copy the outlines onto the glass and then fill them in with black paint. “Rotated at speed, they recreated the movement of the animal with such vitality, viewers were bowled over,” says Herbert.
Muybridge’s moving pictures attracted huge audiences and he was soon a regular on the international lecture circuit. “By the aid of an astonishing apparatus…the ugly animals suddenly became mobile and beautiful and walked, cantered, ambled, galloped and leaped over hurdles in a perfectly natural and lifelike manner,” The Illustrated London News reported after an appearance at the Royal Institution in London.
“The ugly animals suddenly became mobile and beautiful”
In his effort to illuminate all aspects of locomotion, Muybridge made increasingly complex studies of animals – from bucking mules and thundering bison to exotic zoo animals – and of people performing tasks ranging from the ordinary to the Olympian. As his collection of images grew, so did the popularity of his shows.
Warming to his new role, Muybridge, by now calling himself Eadweard instead of Edward, grew more creative. “At first he made simple moving images, such as the horse trotting. Then he began to combine images to create a flock of birds, or horses galloping in different directions, or a man leaping over a bull. He even experimented with cutting sequences in order to tell a story,” says Herbert.
In 1891 Muybridge strayed still further from his scientific mission: criticised for his “old-fashioned” silhouettes, he moved into colour. For the new discs, Muybridge’s artist copied the outlines of photographs and then painted the details, often with considerable imagination. He added figures – a rider on the elephant’s back and spectators at the races. But time had run out for the zoopraxiscope. Celluloid movies were about to make their debut. “There’s no evidence that any of the new discs were ever shown in public, and in 1894 Muybridge returned to England for good,” says Herbert.
For Muybridge it was time to take stock. He wanted his sequence photographs to be regarded as a serious scientific record and feared his foray into entertainment might harm his reputation. “It wasn’t just a question of accuracy being lost by painting the stretched-out images on the discs. Some of the scenes he showed never happened at all.”
Worried about the master discs he had left in the US, Muybridge asked his artist to smash them into little pieces. “I now much regret having ever made them, as they are not calculated to enhance my reputation”.
Herbert disagrees. Muybridge left his own collection of discs and zoopraxiscope to the museum in Kingston upon Thames and Herbert is one of few people to have studied them. “They reveal a skilled animation director. He combined sequences and experimented with cutting.” With very limited technology, he achieved effects that eluded film animators for another 25 years. “He was the first to achieve realistic motion on screen. His figures came to life in a way most later film cartoons didn’t, because they retained the natural movement captured in the original photographs.” Today’s animators have motion sensors and computers to endow computer-generated images with authentic movement. “Essentially, what Muybridge did was CGI without the computer.”
