- Muybridge: The Eye in Motion by Stephen Barber
The equipment bequeathed by photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) to the Kingston-on-Thames Museum in southern England included: his Zoöpraxiscope (with which he projected his celebrated simultaneous photography sequence images of horses trotting), numbers of slides, prints and his majestic 1878 panorama of San Francisco. All of these had been seen and admired by thousands of viewers in the United States and Europe between 1879 and 1893.
These elements of the legacy are covered in a book of essays edited by Stephen Herbert and published in 2004 as: Eadweard Muybridge: The Kingston Museum Bequest. However, Muybridge also left the museum another, almost unknown document: a “unique oracular object of his scrapbook” (9), which he had compiled at the close of his career. Stephen Barber makes this the central element in his reflection on Muybridge and his work.
Born in England, Muybridge spent periods in Central America and Europe, but lived and worked for most of his adult life in the United States. It was here that he produced his celebrated images of the trotting horse – indisputably demonstrating the action of the legs while trotting – at Leyland Stanford’s Palo Alto ranch in California (1878–79). Here, also, he developed his Zoöpraxiscope and first projected moving images; and it was at Pennsylvania University, from 1884, that he took the hundred-thousand-plus images that make up his influential, 11-volume book, Animal Locomotion.
After the Lumières’ success in with their Cinématographe in 1895, and the consequent popularity of projected moving images, Muybridge’s achievements faded from collective consciousness. In 1973, filmmaker Hollis Frampton wrote “one of the most perceptive essays on Muybridge’s work” (10): “Eadweard Muybridge: Fragments of a Tesseract,” which informs aspects of Barber’s understanding of the photographer. Biographies by Gordon Hendricks, in 1975, and Robert Bartlett Haas, the following year, increased interest in the man and his work (both are cited by Barber). Since then, a number of significant studies, essays, and biographies have appeared, examining the techniques of reproduction developed by Muybridge, the ideas that guided his composition of the photographs and the preconceptions and prejudices that his images reflect and express.
Muybridge returned to Kingston in 1894 and, with the exception of one last trip to Pennsylvania, remained there until his death. It was during these final years, that he began to collate the scrapbook, covering the decades of his photographic career. Until the digitization of the scrapbook is [End Page 53] completed, it is only available to those who visit the museum and are given access. Barber’s study, in part the outcome of a Leverhulme–funded research project, is the first to be based on the physical object.
Barber divides his book into three parts. The first part focuses on Muybridge’s life, his choice of subject matter and his innovations in photographic method and projection. Barber makes connections between the assemblage of the contents of the scrapbook and the ways in which memory, selection, deletion and fragmentation operated throughout Muybridge’s life. He also links Muybridge’s work, through the scrapbook, to practices of experimental filmmakers from the 1920s to the 1970s, as well as to digital image making in the present day.
The second part of Barber’s book examines the brief film career of the German Skladanowsky brothers, Max (1863–1939) and Emil (1866–1945), who projected moving pictures before a paying audience in Berlin in November 1895, almost two months before the Lumières’ better-remembered demonstration of their Cinématographe in Paris. In a four-page introduction and one closing paragraph, Barber relates the brothers’ work to that of Muybridge: “The projection of moving-images [in their work]… forms an entity that, in its capacity for excess and captivation, exacts profound oracular, sensorial and corporeal transformations.” [144] Barber links the three as “tricksters” and “self-promoters” and in their trajectories from fame to oblivion to rediscovery. The bulk of this section consists of an article “based on archival consultations in Berlin and Potsdam” [168] and originally written by Barber...