Eadweard Muybridge: pioneer photographerWhether showing us what water droplets look like when hurled from a bucket, or revealing the slow, destructive hand of nature, Eadweard Muybridge almost magically made time visible in space, as a new show at Tate Britain will reveal
Peter Conrad The Observer
Sunday 29 August 2010
David Hockney once complained that photography was a paltry art because its angle on the world is restricted to what the camera sees at the moment of exposure: unlike painting, a photograph can make no space for time. Tate Britain's massive and magnificent forthcoming exhibition of Eadweard Muybridge's work will prove Hockney wrong. Combining artistic vision with scientific analysis, Muybridge showed how an image that paralyses motion can catch the fluency of phenomena. He was one of the great photographic thinkers, whose mind reached ahead from still photography towards the inevitable invention of the cinema, which he anticipated by constructing a gadget called a zoopraxiscope that could animate sequences of images to display mules kicking or nymphs dancing.
Despite his scientific skills, he enjoyed the esoteric mystery of his new medium. Photography writes with light, and in homage to the Greek sun-god Muybridge called himself Helios; the emblem on the business card attached wings to his camera and made it radiate beams, as if the sun were housed in the dark interior of his "Flying Studio". But the would-be deity was also a shrewd faker, a sly self-inventor – he was born, a little too drably for his own taste, as Edward Muggeridge in Kingston upon Thames – and a busy self-promoter. In between photographic expeditions in the Californian wilderness, Panama and Guatemala, lecture tours of Europe, and experimental sessions to study the movement of trotting ponies, galloping horses and skittish deer, he even managed to commit a murder.
Muybridge's great achievement was conceptual: he made time visible in space. His studies of locomotion atomise duration into instants. He demonstrates, for instance, what water looks like, second by second, as it is hurled from a bucket by a bizarrely naked female model. With a battery of cameras tripped by electrical switches he captures minute metamorphoses too quick for the blinking human eye. What we see as a sloppy, slurping mess is a rainbow of gravity-defying droplets, then a looped ribbon that twists around itself, next a leaping fish or a slippery mermaid. He seems to have trapped a spirit, compelling wet ectoplasm to solidify in the air – and of course, like many of his Victorian contemporaries, he could do that as well: when photographing the house of a Californian patron, he included the double-exposed ghost of the owner, patrolling the premises to keep an eye on his wife.
Time is a stream, flowing around us and through us, incising lines on faces as it abrades rocks. Almost magically, Muybridge devised ways of enabling us to see that stealthy entropy at work in nature. Time is written into the sedimentary layers of the cliffs he photographed, or computed in the rings of the inconceivably ancient and enormous Californian sequoias. The grandiose vistas he photographed in Yosemite are not only sublime evidence of God's grandeur or America's glory, like the same scenes when looked at through the cameras of Carleton Watkins and Ansel Adams. Muybridge emphasises the destructive and creative power of water, which over millennia carves tracks through mountains. A lake can pretend to be a placid camera, duplicating and inverting the mountains of Yosemite, but in other moods water is aggressive, able to sculpt stone. Muybridge's long exposures make waterfalls or surging creeks look like sharpened wedges or blunt-ended mallets, weapons that enforce geological flux.
His analytical eye watches for fault lines and fissures, like the sliver a thousand feet deep that cracks apart Eagle Rock. In his studies of the jagged Californian coast he traces the tectonic rift that will eventually unzip the state and send it drifting out into the ocean. The man perched on the edge of a boulder above a dizzy drop in Contemplation Rock, Glacier Point doesn't look at all contemplative. He is less a mystic than a Nietzschean superman, anxious to discover whether he can vault over the crevasse; he seems to be about to swing himself out into the void, to test whether the empty air will serve as a trampoline. Muybridge was a daredevil who had himself lowered over precipices by ropes, and ventured on to escarpments where his team of pack-carriers refused to follow.He followed the advance of the railways that abbreviated time and conquered space as they unified America, but he knew that these technological changes had been anticipated, with epochal gradualness, by nature itself. A glacier in Yosemite, its tracery sharply focused though seen from a remote height, is as implacably regular as the steel tracks being laid by the Union Pacific engineers. Like the railwaymen, Muybridge ignored ecological niceties. He had trees chopped down to improve his sightlines, and occasionally included an axe in the photographs as a token of his interference; developing the negatives, he even moved boulders around for aesthetic effect.
The spoils of this war between culture and nature were heaped up on the hills of San Francisco. Muybridge, appraising the place, was of course not content with partial views. In 1878, positioned on the exclusive summit of Nob Hill, where the railway magnates and goldmine owners had their mansions, he set up a camera that was itself a small skyscraper – a wooden box on a tripod that had to be stabilised to resist the high winds, with heavy, fearfully fragile glass plates fitted inside it – and photographed the whole of the city that sprawled below. The overlapping exposures of his panorama took him a day to complete; laid end to end, they flatten the circular view into a strip that measures more than 17 feet.
Once again, time is included – the time it took Muybridge to piece the gigantic amalgam together, computed by the difference between the sharp noon light of the first plates and the mistier, more diffuse atmosphere of the final ones, and the time it takes our own eyes to saunter down all the diverging streets that lunge into the bay and to take soaring inventory of the shacks, the steeples, the boxy utilitarian offices, the masts of the ships in the harbour and the uncountable industrial chimneys. The time spent building this improbable, precarious place – soon to be toppled by an earthquake, razed by a fire and then built up again – is also made manifest. You can see urban history happening, just as Muybridge lets you see water cavorting as it flies through the air. A house like a shoddy wooden crate inside a paling fence abuts on one of the plutocratic palaces; pavements alternate with dusty stretches of unmade road. A vacant lot is a reminder of unspoiled nature, until you notice that it has been rudely sliced open on one side to be used as a quarry. The rails for the first cable car, its underground tackle of haulage wires holding together the slithery slope of California Street, announce technology's final assault on this arduous terrain.All the same, every line of perspective you follow ends in vacuity: glassy water, the depopulated hills across the bay, the milky, featureless sky. And this is a city whose citizens, literally the victims of their own mobility, have blurred into spectres during the exposure. A disembodied eye surveys a depopulated world. In Yosemite we see the world as it was at the beginning; in San Francisco we see the world as it might be after the end.
Muybridge's work can be, as it is here, spectacularly terrifying. On other occasions – as when he gets a woman costumed as a Greek nymph to walk endlessly up and down stairs holding a teacup so that he can study the locomotive processes involved, or persuades wrestlers to mime sodomy in a set of images that predictably fascinated Francis Bacon – he is either whimsical or frankly weird. His odd self-portraits suggest something of his strangeness. In one he pretends to be harmlessly dozing in an art gallery; in another he appears, abstractly reshaped into a black lump, in a reflecting globe set up in an amusement park. He performed for his own locomotion studies, dressed only in underpants despite his sagacious white beard: imagine Moses exercising at the gym.
Most unsettling of all is a portrait by a colleague in which Muybridge hunches, scowling with paranoia, at the base of a patriarchal sequoia, apparently ready to wriggle into a cavity between its roots. Here the man who wielded the axe resembles a potential axe murderer, and in 1874 he did indeed gun down his wife's lover. Placed on trial for murder, he first pleaded insanity, then allowed his lawyer to admit his guilt while entreating the jury "to send him forth free to resume that profession which is now his only love". Art, luckily, mattered more than the piddling strictures of the law, and Muybridge was acquitted. Everyone who goes to the Tate exhibition will be grateful for the miscarriage of justice.Eadweard Muybridge opens at Tate Britain, London, on 8 Sept, and runs until 16 Jan.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/aug/29/eadweard-muybridge-tate-review
Eadweard Muybridge: Feet off the groundHe transformed photography and laid the foundations for motion pictures, but Eadweard Muybridge has always been dogged by controversy. His biographer, Rebecca Solnit, defends the great innovator against a new campaign of innuendo
Rebecca Solnit
The Guardian
Saturday 4 September 2010
This summer, 128 years after he was driven out of London in humiliation, Kingston upon Thames's most prodigal son and San Francisco's most extraordinary photographer gets his due with a big show of his photographs at Tate Britain. History has yet to settle the verdict on this brilliant photographer whose work laid the foundation for motion pictures. Even in this belated moment of triumph, Eadweard Muybridge's authorship is yet again being called into question for the third time since his series of landmark achievements.
Muybridge was born Edward James Muggeridge in Kingston, in 1830, the year the first passenger railway ran, at the start of the decade that ended with the introduction of photography, the medium in which he would achieve wonders. He told his grandmother as he prepared to emigrate to America and turned down her pile of sovereigns, "No, thank you Grandma, I'm going to make a name for myself. If I fail, you will never hear of me again."He did make a name for himself, though perhaps too late for her – several names, in fact, since he changed his name to Muygridge about when he arrived in San Francisco in 1855 to begin a brief, successful career as a bookseller. Five years later, he was headed east when the horses pulling his stagecoach stampeded, resulting in a head injury so serious that it may have transformed his personality, and certainly required a long convalescence. That was his first return to his homeland, and he stayed until 1866 or 1867, skipping the American civil war and tinkering with various inventions. Somewhere along the way he learned photography, because in 1867 he returned to San Francisco as an accomplished photographer named Muybridge. (His other name change, of Edward to the Anglo-Saxon Eadweard, came later and may have been after the coronation stone in his hometown that is inscribed with the names of two King Eadweards.)
The photographer Muybridge began with a series of images of Yosemite, the dramatic valley of waterfalls, sheer cliffs, and picturesque groves in the wilderness of the Sierra Nevada, and went on to photograph his city, the surrounding countryside, mansions and their occupants, lighthouses of the Pacific coast, military installations, the Modoc Indian war, and more. He compiled a huge catalogue of images while roaming the west coast from Alaska to Panama and exploring the possibilities of photography.
He was restless with the medium's limitations, in 1869 patenting a camera sky shade so that he could expose his film separately for the sky and the subject below (film in that era was so sensitive to blue light it routinely overexposed skies into blank whiteness). He added clouds and even the moon to many early landscapes, using the darkroom equivalent of Photoshop to doctor them. His images were themselves restless, seeking the chaotic, the startling, the moody, and the unsettling in his most personal work, the landscapes.
Note the same cloud formation
And then, in 1872, his primarily scenic work took a detour, thanks to the curiosity of a railroad baron. The millionaire Leland Stanford took up racehorses as a pastime. He also took up the debate about whether all four feet of a trotting horse are ever off the ground at the same time and looked for a novel way to solve the question. He commissioned Muybridge to photograph Occident, one of his champion trotters, in motion.Photography in that era was slow – slower than the world around it. It might be faster than drawing and painting, but it was hardly instantaneous: landscape photographers looked for still mornings in which no breeze disturbed trees and water; portrait photographers used iron neck braces to keep their subjects still, and the children often blurred anyway as they fidgeted during slow exposures. Muybridge had to try to make a photograph that captured not just motion but incredibly rapid motion, and though he succeeded well enough for Stanford's initial purposes (yes, the horse did have all four feet off the ground), his images were rough silhouettes. There was a little fanfare, and the project slipped into the background.
Muybridge was then one of the two great landscape photographers of the west coast, the other being Carleton Watkins, and while Watkins was a classicist, making serene, stately pictures of a still, eternal world of beauty, Muybridge was a romantic who sought out the uncanny, the unsettling, the uncertain, notably in his mammoth-plate photographs of Yosemite in 1872, the same year he photographed Stanford's trotter.
In 1877, after Muybridge made some technological breakthroughs in photographic chemistry that still remain murky, his work with Stanford resumed. Stanford supplied the money and the horses; Muybridge supplied the direction and the technical skill, though he sought out the Central Pacific Railroad's engineers and technicians to help him develop new high-speed mechanical camera shutters. Cameras before then rarely had shutters. You just took the lens cap off by hand and put it back on after a few seconds or minutes. But Muybridge was heading toward the (pre-digital) modern camera, the one with sensitive film and some means of triggering the shutters to make exposures in hundredths of seconds. With these breakthroughs he began to photograph horses again.
The result was an extraordinary series of images. He made multiple exposures in quick succession and printed them together as grids. The real subject was not the object but the motion, not the noun but the verb: trotting, running, walking, leaping. He photographed men as well as horses, including himself nude, swinging a pick, a tall, morose man whose muscles made him look younger and hair made him look older than his age of half a century. The motion studies would eventually show men, women and children, along with animals ranging from elk to an ostrich and a lot more horses.
He created another strange device which, with his talent for naming things awkwardly (starting with himself), he called the zoopraxiscope. It was the ancestor of the motion-picture projector: it broadcast those images of creatures in motion as a fast-moving series that appeared to be, rather than many successive images, one image that moved. He began to show enthusiastic audiences these flickering short movies of actions, and some consider this to be the birth of cinema.
For Stanford, who had a stableful of spectacular racehorses, the project was always about horses – he saw it as useful for understanding their anatomy, movement, and plotting their training, and little more. For Muybridge it was about photography and more – about possibilities that had not been named. Physiologists, photographers, scientists of all sorts, and painters were excited by his breakthroughs. He took his zoopraxiscope and photographs abroad.In Paris he was befriended by the great physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey, who would abandon his other methods and focus on photography as the best means to investigate motion. Painters were both thrilled and dismayed that a horse in motion was so little like the images of rocking-horse gallopers they had been painting for ever, and the very idea of painterly accuracy began to disintegrate. Did you paint what the world looked like to the slow human eye or the high-speed camera? Paris was enthralled. Muybridge was at the height of his career.
And then came London. On 13 March 1882, the Prince and Princess of Wales attended his presentation at the Royal Institution, and London seemed prepared to embrace him as Paris had. The photographer, who was nearly 52, had the foamy beard and fierce eyebrows of an ayatollah, and cut a dashing figure in evening dress. But it was his pictures that astonished. The Photographic News exclaimed, "After Mr Muybridge had shown his audience the quaint and (apparently) impossible positions that the horse assumes in his different gaits, he then most ingeniously combined the pictures on the screen, showing them one after another so rapidly that the audience had before them the galloping horse, the trotting horse, &etc. A new world of sights and wonders was, indeed, opened by photography, which was not less astounding because it was truth itself."
Muybridge's own truth was called into question by the Royal Society a few days after his debut. Stanford and his doctor friend JDB Stillman had published a book behind his back, titled The Horse in Motion as Shown By Instantaneous Photography in which they had denied Muybridge all credit. The Royal Society reproached him, invitations evaporated, his reputation was tarnished, and the humiliated Muybridge scrambled for money to return to the US.He sued Stanford for injury to his reputation, but suing one of the richest men in the country and one of California's most conscienceless double-crossers was a losing game. Stanford's lawyers managed to shift the focus from the broad array of technical and conceptual achievements of the motion-study photographs to the electrical trigger for Muybridge's cameras made by one of the railroad engineers. They won. Muybridge resumed his experiments in high-speed sequential photography in Philadelphia and his career regained some of its momentum in the later 1880s, but he never reached the heights of attention he had before the defamation. He eventually retired to his birthplace, where he died in 1904.
In his lifetime motion pictures proper were invented, with contributions from Thomas Edison, the Lumière brothers, and others, and Muybridge was given a little credit for his founding role. But when one of the first histories of motion pictures was written, Muybridge was denied credit all over again. Terry Ramsaye's book, A Million and One Nights, was influenced by one of those surviving engineers, an unscrupulous egomaniac named John D Isaacs. Isaacs had in fact worked on the camera shutters, but in the 1920s, when no one else was around to correct him, he began to exaggerate his role at Muybridge's expense, and Ramsaye took Isaacs at face value, filling his history with slights to Muybridge's contribution and detours into his domestic scandals. Muybridge's reputation remained eclipsed for decades.History now remembers him in fragments, as a landscape photographer, as a technical innovator, as a key figure in the long march to motion pictures, as the maker of the motion studies whose grids of images and images themselves influenced everyone from the painter Francis Bacon to the conceptual artist Sol LeWitt. His accomplishment is so broad and curious that few have assimilated it into what is, despite everything, a coherent achievement. And a new round of challenges to his originality and even his authorship have surfaced in the last few years.
In the course of making the case for Carleton Watkins's genius, the J Paul Getty Museum's just-retired photography curator, Weston J Naef, has been nibbling away at Muybridge's standing. Watkins was a gorgeously gifted landscape photographer whose standing doesn't need enhancement, but Naef in 2008 mounted an exhibition at the Getty that attempted to attribute anonymous images to Watkins on sketchy evidence and suggested that Watkins influenced Muybridge's serial imagery for the motion studies. After the Muybridge show now opening at Tate Britain, opened at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington DC, Naef gave a long interview suggesting that Watkins, who was the same age but took up photography earlier, helped, taught, mentored and sometimes outright made Muybridge's photographs.
Naef even questioned how Muybridge could have become, in 1868, such a "world-class" photographer with so little background in the medium. The three-part online interview casts doubt on much of Muybridge's achievement, with little evidence other than Naef's standing in the photographic world. The curator even questions whether Muybridge actually went to Alaska in 1868 and made the images published under his name, though they were commissioned by the government and circulated by the artist as his work at the time with no questions asked. The general who commissioned them wrote to Muybridge about them.
It's a campaign of innuendo: Muybridge's 1872 Yosemite photographs are unquestionably brilliant and unquestionably his, but Naef says: "The interesting question is whether Watkins could have been standing nearby coaching him." Given that Muybridge was sometimes standing atop a boulder in the middle of a stream or on a precipice and other places where, the newspaper noted, "his packers refused to follow him", as well as high-country places far above Yosemite Valley that Watkins never photographed and is not known to have gone to, this is unlikely. I asked my sometime collaborator Mark Klett – who worked with photographer Byron Wolfe and me to rephotograph those Yosemite photographs some years ago – an adventure that involved a lot of scrambling to cliff edges – for his opinion.
Muybridge photographed artist Albert Bierstadt painting among the Paiute of Yosemite Valley in 1872By rephotographing many of the great 19th-century western landscape photographers, Mark – an important western landscape photographer in his own right – has come to know their work with an intimacy only a fellow maker can achieve. He wrote to me, "I doubt Watkins was standing behind Muybridge coaching him – especially when Muybridge is standing in precarious places. And the compositions are just so different that it would reduce Watkins' role to that of a technical adviser in any case, which is a limited service I would be sceptical that he offered."
I spent some years on a biography of Muybridge, and though his life and work possess many mysteries, there's nothing unbelievable about the pretty-good images of 1868 that led to the spectacular images of 1872, or to the later experiments. One might as well question whether Joseph Conrad wrote his own early work, given the lack of literary talent demonstrated before his first novel was published when he was 37 and the fact that he did not even learn the English language until he was in his 20s.As Mark puts it, "Finally, regarding the time it took Muybridge to master the process I can only say that each photographer proceeds with technical proficiency at a different pace. He might have been a fast learner, he might have had some technical training, maybe both. We do know that Muybridge demonstrates amazing technical feats others had not been able to perform by the time he works on the motion studies. If he's that proficient later on I would argue he was probably a pretty fast starter to begin with." One hundred and eighty years after his birth, 128 years after his ruckus with the Royal Society, it would be pleasing if his career would settle down. But the pictures speak for themselves.
Eadweard Muybridge is at Tate Britain from 8 September until 16 January 2011.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/sep/04/eadweard-muybridge-exhibition-rebecca-solnit
See also http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/apr/27/eadweard-muybridge-tate-britain-motion-studies
http://www.stephenherbert.co.uk/muybCOMPLEAT.htm
http://www.dawsonbooks.com/viewgallery.php?ID=16
For details go to
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/eadweardmuybridge/default.shtm
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