Eadweard Muybridge

Muybridge’s Career and Sequential Photographs of Horses

Eadweard Muybridge was born in Kingston upon Thames, England, in 1830 and moved to the United States in the 1850s.^*1 After working as a bookseller and in other occupations in California, he turned to photography. From the late 1860s, he gained recognition for his large-format landscape photographs of Yosemite and San Francisco. Through landscape photography, he mastered the technique of organizing a broad expanse of space into still images from a single vantage point.^*2

In 1872, the businessman Leland Stanford commissioned him to use photography to investigate a horse’s gait. By 1878, Muybridge had successfully photographed motion in sequence by arranging multiple cameras along a track. The importance of this work extends beyond confirming that all four of a horse’s hooves leave the ground. Its methodological shift lay in triggering multiple devices in temporal order, turning motion itself into a sequence of frames instead of using one camera to capture a decisive instant.^*3

Following a lecture in Philadelphia in 1883, a purpose-built outdoor studio was constructed in 1884 on the grounds of the University of Pennsylvania’s veterinary hospital, expanding the project into Animal Locomotion. The university advanced $5,000 and provided a setting with three black walls, a white measuring grid, and banks of cameras. The defining change of the 1880s was the transformation of a private experiment into an institutional study of motion supported by university funding, facilities, subjects, and publishing.^*4

Breaking Down Time with Multiple Cameras

Muybridge’s motion photographs are historically important for more than proving the positions of a horse’s body. By placing multiple cameras at equal intervals and triggering their shutters in sequence, he converted a single movement into a series of still images arranged along a timeline.^*6 As the Library of Congress notes, this apparatus made visible instants that the naked eye could not isolate, replacing ordinary vision with a mechanical division of time.^*7 While Marey compressed time into a single image through multiple exposures on one dry plate, Muybridge unfolded time across independent frames.^*29

Animal Locomotion at the University of Pennsylvania

For the study begun in 1884, Muybridge used three banks of twelve cameras, thirty-six in total, with electrically activated shutters and dry plates in place of wet plates. A white grid covered the walls of the black outdoor studio, allowing the distance traveled and the subject’s posture to be compared across frames. By standardizing the apparatus, background, and time intervals, he made motion into repeatable observational material instead of a moment skillfully captured by a photographer.^*4

Published in 1887, Animal Locomotion comprised 781 plates. It presented walking, running, jumping, sports, everyday activities such as domestic work and manual labor, and a variety of zoo animals in the same sequential format. Patients from Philadelphia Hospital also served as subjects. From a contemporary perspective, a study that classified human bodies as specimens of motion raises ethical questions alongside its scientific utility, including whose bodies were subjected to observation and classification.^*4 The publication was used by artists, anatomists, physiologists, and athletes, setting a precedent for photographs to circulate simultaneously as works of art and scientific documents.^*13

Three-Directional Photography and the Classification of Bodies

The University of Pennsylvania apparatus did more than photograph a movement in sequence from one side. Its multiple banks of cameras made it possible to compare the same action from the side, front, and an oblique angle. Walking and jumping could thus be treated as data encompassing different directions instead of as a single beautiful pose. The photographic equipment and materials in the university archives offer concrete evidence of this research environment.^*5 Publication records for Animal Locomotion show that the plates were organized by action, subject, camera angle, and time interval; the publication itself was designed as a searchable catalog of motion.^*12

Placing bodies against the same background and recording them at the same intervals and angles may appear to describe universal human movement, but the selection of particular bodies as ideals or standards was not neutral. Elspeth H. Brown analyzes the male bodies in Animal Locomotion through the racialized “virile body” and gender norms that took shape in late nineteenth-century America.^*32 Sequential photographs could suppress individual differences to make bodies comparable, while that very comparison could also make norms of health, masculinity, race, and ability visible. Muybridge’s innovation in photographic history must therefore be understood as both a way of showing motion and a means of reinforcing the visual forms through which modern society compared and classified bodies.

Circulation in Art, Medicine, and Sports

The sequential photographs circulated beyond the photographer’s studio as references for artists depicting the human body, observational material for physiology and anatomy, and aids for comparing athletic movements. PhotoAnthology emphasizes that the study has been repeatedly cited in both science and art.^*14 The Met’s holdings from Animal Locomotion likewise demonstrate the plates’ dual status: made as scientific records, they are now preserved as works in the histories of photography and art.^*8

The Zoopraxiscope’s Design and Public Projection

Muybridge devised the zoopraxiscope in 1879 and gave public projection lectures in San Francisco in 1880. It is therefore more accurate to distinguish the year of invention from the year of public projection than to say it was publicly presented in 1879.^*27 For the device, figures of people and animals based on sequential photographs were redrawn around the circumference of a glass disc. As the disc rotated, a shutter briefly projected each image onto a screen. The surviving disc and shutter in the Science Museum Group collection demonstrate this construction.^*26

The device differed from later motion-picture projectors, which transported photographic negatives on a strip of film. Yet it marked an important stage in the history of moving images by connecting two operations: breaking motion down photographically and reassembling the sequence before an audience as a moving image. Describing Muybridge as a pioneer who established a practical link between sequential photography and projection clarifies how his work differed from later film technology without presenting him as the sole inventor of cinema. The Science Museum Group likewise explains his work as an intersection of motion photography and early moving-image technology.^*28

Glass Discs and the Lecture as Media

The zoopraxiscope did not project the sequential photographs directly; their contours were refined and the figures redrawn on glass discs. Muybridge Image & Context presents this “zoopraxography” as a process of remaking situated between photography and projection.^*15 The discs and apparatus preserved at Kingston Museum provide physical evidence of how photographed motion was transformed into visual teaching material for lectures.^*16 Published in 1893, Descriptive Zoopraxography was Muybridge’s own account of his motion studies and projection device, articulating photography, analysis, and public presentation as a unified method.^*9

Muybridge as Scientific Photographer and Precursor to Cinema

Animal Locomotion did more than create a transparent window onto the “truth” of motion. Its black background, white grid, fixed direction of travel, nude bodies and prescribed actions, and multiple camera angles transformed bodies into material designed for comparison. Scientific objectivity arose from the studio, directions given to subjects, time intervals, classification, and publication format as well as from the camera. The photographic apparatus, cropping masks, and even a retouching desk preserved in the University of Pennsylvania archives show that these photographs belonged to a system that included post-exposure selection and production.^*4

Placing bodies within the same grid and time intervals enabled comparison while turning subjects into specimens for classification. The inclusion of Philadelphia Hospital patients shows that the production of medical knowledge cannot be separated from the power relations that determined whose bodies were placed under observation. The continuing preservation of Muybridge materials for study in NYU Special Collections reflects questions that reach beyond technological history into the representation of bodies, medical history, and gender studies.^*22

Patients with Neurological Disorders and Medical Observation

Animal Locomotion included patients from Philadelphia Hospital as well as members of the public and athletes. Recently rediscovered clinical records confirm that Muybridge collaborated with the neurologist Francis Dercum to photographically study how neurological disorders, including ataxia, altered gait.^*30 This offers a concrete example of sequential photography’s contribution to medical knowledge while also showing how bodies affected by illness became objects of comparison and classification before a university research apparatus. Its scientific utility must be considered together with the asymmetry between observer and observed.

A broader view of the relationship with pathology shows that Muybridge’s work was not an isolated undertaking. Marta Braun and Elizabeth Whitcombe compare photographs of pathological gait by Muybridge, Marey, and Albert Londe, examining how late nineteenth-century neurology used sequential photography to record and classify abnormalities of movement visible on the body’s surface.^*34 The capacity of sequential photography to make phenomena visible expanded medical knowledge while abstracting patients’ bodies into cases. The scientific character of motion photography must be assessed in terms of both its observational achievements and the institutions that rendered those observed into classifiable objects.

Publications and Museum Collections

Animal Locomotion circulated as a large-format publication in eleven volumes and appears in the Library of Congress catalog as an 1887 publication.^*24 The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History holds an individual plate as an artifact in the history of science and technology.^*18 The Seattle Art Museum holds a work from the same series as art, crossing the boundary between scientific documentation and fine-art photography.^*20 An individual plate also entered the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts, demonstrating how museums in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have reframed a nineteenth-century research publication as “art.”^*25

The Collaborative Structure Preserved in the Archive

Muybridge’s research cannot be reduced to the invention of a lone genius. Contracts with the university, equipment, correspondence, and publications preserved at the University of Pennsylvania make it possible to trace a collaborative project involving funders, university personnel, technicians, and subjects.^*5 Selected materials published by the university archives include documents and plates that trace the research process, revealing an institutional background to production and study that the finished sequential photographs alone cannot show.^*10 Penn Libraries also organizes Muybridge materials as a major collection in its own right, allowing photographs, publications, and research materials to be consulted together.^*11 The Smithsonian Archives of American Art preserves another body of documents concerning the University of Pennsylvania and Muybridge’s motion studies, providing resources that span photographic and institutional history.^*17 The inclusion of Animal Locomotion in an exhibition at the FUJIFILM SQUARE Photo History Museum shows that the study now circulates beyond the history of American science in international education on photographic history.^*23

Continuity from Landscape Photography to Motion Studies

Before turning to motion photography, Muybridge organized views of Yosemite and San Francisco through multiple viewpoints, panoramas, and large-format photographs. SFMOMA’s artist materials document a long career that includes landscape photography and resists limiting his identity to motion studies alone.^*19 The National Gallery of Art likewise treats his Western landscapes and motion studies as parts of a single photographer’s career.^*21 Although their subjects differ, the landscapes and motion photographs share a process of mechanically dividing vision and subsequently rearranging it to produce forms of seeing unlike those of the human eye.

Reconstructing Time, Not Inventing Cinema

The zoopraxiscope did not operate like later motion-picture film, but Muybridge’s public lectures demonstrated that still images are perceived as motion when sequential photographs are shown in temporal order. The Kingston collections preserve the apparatus, discs, and lecture materials together, making it possible to trace the transformation of photographic results into an audience’s experience of time.^*16 At the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Muybridge operated the “Zoopraxographical Hall,” turning motion studies into projected entertainment for a large audience.^*4 His place in the prehistory of cinema lies in his concrete articulation, through photography, publication, and projection, of photography’s transition from preserving an instant to breaking down and reconstructing time.

Current Assessments and Reconsiderations

Scholarship has moved beyond celebrating Muybridge’s technical innovations to examine how faithfully he captured natural movement and how selection and retouching affected claims to scientific objectivity. Penn Today presents the motion studies as a transformation in science and visual culture while describing Muybridge’s relationships with contemporary researchers and artists.^*13 PhotoAnthology’s account similarly surveys the work’s lasting role as a reference in both art and science.^*14 Attending to this dual character places Muybridge beyond the simple heroic image of the “father of cinema” and identifies him as a complicated figure who incorporated modern time measurement and bodily classification into photography.

Recent scholarship has also been cautious about reading Animal Locomotion solely as a success story in which machines produced objective truth. A study in History of Photography focuses on sequences ill-suited to physiological analysis: actions unrelated to productivity, such as dancing, reclining, and posing; inconsistent time intervals; and rearranged plates. It notes that photographs exceeding the logic of mechanization and standardization exist within the same atlas.^*31 Animal Locomotion was therefore a scientific apparatus that standardized bodies while also preserving movements and photographic failures that did not fully conform to that standard. Contemporary critical assessment reads beyond a binary between science and art to consider the gap between the order intended by the apparatus and the images it actually produced.

Marta Braun has further reconsidered Muybridge’s authority as a scientific photographer through his post-exposure retouching, cropping, and rearrangement of images, as well as his relationship with the University of Pennsylvania’s Muybridge Committee.^*33 This does not mean that the work was “fake.” It shows that scientific objectivity was not automatically guaranteed by the camera but was constructed through human decisions about which images to select and alter and how to sequence them for publication. Muybridge’s significance in photographic history also lies in exposing how objectivity itself is designed, beyond the myth that the mechanical eye eliminated human subjectivity.