Eadweard Muybridge, born April 9, 1830 and died May 8, 1904, was an English photographer important for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion and in motion-picture projection.
Muybridge’s experiments in photographing motion began in 1872, when the railroad magnate Leland Stanford hired him to prove that during a particular moment in a trotting horse’s gait, all four legs are off the ground simultaneously. His first efforts were unsuccessful because his camera lacked a fast shutter. The project was then interrupted while Muybridge was being tried for the murder of his wife’s lover. Although he was acquitted, he found it expedient to travel for a number of years in Mexico and Central America, making publicity photographs for the Union Pacific Railroad, a company owned by Stanford.
In 1877 he returned to California and resumed his experiments in motion photography, using a battery of from 12 to 24 cameras and a special shutter he developed that gave an exposure of 2/1000 of a second. This arrangement gave satisfactory results and proved Stanford’s contention.
The results of Muybridge’s work were widely published, most often in the form of line drawings taken from his photographs. They were criticized, however, by those who thought that horse’s legs could never assume such unlikely positions. To counter such criticism, Muybridge gave lectures on animal locomotion throughout the United States and Europe. These lectures were illustrated with a zoopraxiscope, a lantern he developed that projected images in rapid succession onto a screen from photographs printed on a rotating glass disc, producing the illusion of moving pictures. The zoopraxiscope display, an important predecessor of the modern cinema, was a sensation at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago.
Analysis
Muybridge’s most famous image is the image which started the cinematic world. This image is shows a horse running in a typology like grid, which when played in quick succession creates a sense of movement. Taken with a self made camera Muybridge created this image for railroad magnate Leland Stanford who wanted to prove that a horses legs don’t touch the ground in one point of its gallop. After this was proved many people dint believe it and discredited the project, which Muybridge lashed back at by creating a zoopraxiscope which was like a projector which played each image after each other creating a sense of movement. The image was taken with an exposure of 2/1000 of a second, and a special shutter he created to allow the right amount of light in to take the photo.
I feel I can use this in my work by creating typologies of stalls to tell a story about the subject of the photos. I feel it can also be liked to Qingjuns work as all of the images are similar, and can be put into a typology as well..