Eadweard Muybridge was important for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion and in motion-picture projection.
Producing over 100,000 images of animals and humans in motion, capturing what the human eye could not distinguish as separate movements. He was a bridge between still photography and recorded movement.
Leland Stanford hired him to prove that during a particular moment when a horse is trotting, all four legs are off the ground simultaneously. His first efforts were unsuccessful because his camera lacked a fast shutter. After awhile he used a special shutter he developed that gave an exposure of 2/1000 of a second. This arrangement gave satisfactory results. By 1878 he was photographing horses in motion using batteries of cameras, their shutters triggered by the horse’s movement over trip wires. The results were a technical and conceptual breakthrough. In their published form, they laid out the span of time captured by the cameras as a sequence of stop-motion images unlike anything that had been seen before.
Seeking a means of sharing his groundbreaking work, he invented the zoopraxiscope, a method of projecting animated versions of his photographs as short moving sequences, which anticipated subsequent developments in the history of cinema.
This work reminds me of the artist Andy Warhol’s early work where he uses repetition as a device to alter our perception of a different type of society portrait, creating different variations of the same image.
In the early 1960s, he began a series of portraits of stars. He used photographic silkscreen printing to create his celebrity portraits. This meant he could directly reproduce images already in the public eye, such as publicity shots or tabloid photographs
To respond to this work I could also photograph something moving with a fast shutter speed to create a series of images of the same object. Similarly, I could take the same photo and create different variations in colour and appearance and display them together like Andy Warhol.
This perception of seeing the smoke is perhaps one of my favourite images, this is due to the interesting composition. I believe the effortlessly of the lighting, and a habit which is deemed as dangerous and unhealthy, is almost presented as beautiful within this image. The lighting is almost embellished within the fluidity of the weaving smoke. And something which was once deadly she had now turned into art. I also think the use of the shadow instead of showing the whole man himself, also creates a more successful piece. it brings out a more occurrent resemblance of mystery within the work. Too the image on the left is a scene of a hardship, and flooding, it is once again something never seen as beautiful or perhaps even a sight portrayed as picturesc. Below i’ve added some quote and reasonings as two why the artist has created these images, and what they mean to her.’ Enclosed between four walls, the sound of silence never seemed louder. It’s claustrophobic. I wait for the phone to ring, check for emails obsessively, eat everything out of the fridge. The hunger remains. I feel like if I dig my hand deep into my soul, I will find nothing. The awareness I am experiencing is unspeakable. Faces change when we meet. Is their solitude reflected in mine? There is an awkward silence.’
