Man in motion Man in motion (February 07, 2003)

A new exhibit at Stanford showcases the pioneering photography of Eadward Muybridge

by Robyn Israel

L egend has it that photographer Eadward Muybridge's greatest accomplishment began as a bet.

The bettor was none other than Leland Stanford, a passionate horseman with a profound interest in the mechanics of equestrian motion. Upon hearing some prominent East Coast horsemen claim that a trotting horse always has at least one foot touching the ground, the local railroad baron set out, with some West Coast friends, to counter that belief. It was Stanford's firm belief that trotters, at some point in their stride, had all four feet off the ground.

According to legend, Stanford bet $25,000 on the matter and hired Muybridge to prove his point. Accepting the commission in 1872, Muybridge succeeded in capturing Occident, one of Stanford's 800 racehorses, with all four feet off the ground. Those photographs, taken with a series of cameras, not only validated Stanford's theory but also, for the first time, captured high-speed motion -- a breakthrough that eventually made motion pictures possible.

Those famous 19th-century photographs are part of a new exhibition at Stanford University's Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts. Entitled "Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement," the exhibition presents nearly 200 rare works by Muybridge, his predecessors and his contemporaries, such as Thomas Eakins, Etienne-Jules Marey, Ottomar Anschutz and Albert Londe. Organized by guest curator Phillip Prodger, a former intern at the Cantor Arts Center who is now assistant curator at the St. Louis Art Museum, the exhibition places Muybridge's revolutionary accomplishments in a historic context for the first time.

"No one had looked back and seen where Muybridge had been coming from," Cantor Arts Center Chief Curator Bernard Barryte said. "The objective of this exhibition was to explore Muybridge's roots and to investigate the trajectory from whence he came. In the end, we see him as the figure who culminates a movement that had gone on since the invention of photography in 1839, (and carried out) by a myriad of photographers, both known and unknown."

Much of the material in the exhibition comes from the Cantor Arts Center and Stanford University Special Collections. This includes early proofs, negatives, slides, related drawings, paintings and examples from "The Horse in Motion."

Muybridge's initial study of horses later expanded to an investigation of other animals and human beings. One segment of the exhibition is dedicated to the motion studies Muybridge conducted at the University of Pennsylvania, which began in 1884. By 1886, he would take about 30,000 photographs. One series of photographs in the exhibit depicts a man engaged in lifting and lowering a ball.

"It seems very simple," Barryte said. "But what are the stages? What muscles are being used? How does the hand twist?"

True scientists might question the study's validity, Barryte said, as Muybridge would carefully select which of the various instances in the sequence might be most useful in telling the motion's story.

"He took the raw data and edited it for didactic purposes, so if you're a purist you'd question the validity of the end result."

The Pennsylvania motion studies range from the serious to the bizarre - a contortionist twisted in oddball positions; men wearing G strings engaged in swordplay; a well-dressed lady jumping over a stool; a little girl walking up steps; and a 340-pound woman laboriously getting up from the ground to stand up. There is also a series devoted to the study of an individual with multiple sclerosis.

The exhibition concludes with the birth of cinema, as exemplified by Muybridge's zoopraxiscope, which was designed to project short loops of photographs assembled from his experiments. Visitors can see how his rudimentary motion-picture projector cast moving images onto a screen -- the precursor of modern cinema.

Born in England, Muybridge moved to the United States around 1852, eventually settling in San Francisco and entering the book business. He first made his mark as a landscape photographer, gaining acclaim for his images of the American West. His talent impressed Stanford, who specifically commissioned him for the horse-motion studies in 1872.

But Muybridge would have a bitter falling out with Stanford 11 years later, when "The Horse in Motion," a book published under Stanford's auspices, was published, with no credit made to the photographer on the title page. Written by a medical doctor named JDB Stillman, it contained no mention of Muybridge until Stanford's introduction, where he appeared as the "very skillful photographer" Stanford had hired to investigate his ideas about equine motion. Moreover, Stillman and Stanford had taken the photographs and turned them into lithographs, as photographs were very costly to publish at the time. Muybridge was outraged and sued Stanford for $50,000 in damages. He lost the case.

Muybridge was no stranger to controversy. He had landed in court some years earlier, after learning that his wife, Flora, was having an affair. He murdered her lover, Harry Larkyns, and went on trial for first-degree murder, for which the punishment was death. His lawyers used an insanity defense that ultimately exonerated him, after a three-month confinement. His wife died several months later at the age of 24.

But the great scandal of Muybridge's life is certainly not the focus of the current exhibition. Instead, it is the groundbreaking work of the photographer who first captured motion invisible to the naked eye that takes center stage in the Pigott Gallery.

"He was certainly persistent," Barryte said. "He had the patience to work through this process and develop it. It took a good deal of ingenuity."

What: "Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement" A fully illustrated catalogue, co-published with Oxford University Press, accompanies the exhibition.

Where: The Cantor Arts Center's Pigott Family Gallery. The center is located on the Stanford University campus off Palm Drive, at Lomita Drive and Museum Way. Parking is free after 4 p.m. and on weekends.

When: Through May 11. The center is open 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesday-Sunday; Thursday until 8 p.m. Docents will give free tours throughout the exhibition on Thursdays at 12:15 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays at 2 p.m. No reservation is needed. To schedule private tours for groups of 10 or more, call (650) 723-3469.

Cost: Admission is free.

Info: Call (650) 723-4177 or visit www.stanford.edu/dept/ccva.
The Cantor Arts Center and the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History will jointly present a symposium on Saturday, May 3. Entitled "Eadward Muybridge, Pioneer - But of What?" the symposium will be held in the Cantor Arts Center Auditorium. Admission is free. For information and reservations, call (650) 725-3155.