Time Stands Still Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement

by Prodger, Phillip

• ISBN13: 9780195149647
• ISBN10: 0195149645
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-11-13
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Eadweard Muybridge, one of the great pioneer-innovators of the 19th century, is a familiar figure to students of art history, photography, and cinema. Best known for the photographs of horses and other animals in motion that he made in the 1870s and '80s, Muybridge was the first person to use photography to freeze rapid action for analysis and study. He devised a method for photographing episodes of behavior using a series of cameras, producing some of the most famous sequential photographs ever made. These pictures, the first successful photographs of rapidly moving subjects, revolutionized expectations of what photography could reveal about the natural world, and ultimately led to the invention of the motion picture in the mid-1890s. Time Stands Still is the catalogue that accompanies a major exhibition celebrating Muybridge's fascinating work. Though the instantaneous photography movement stands as a crucial event in the progression of photography to motion pictures, this exhibition represents the first major organized treatment of the subject. Opening in spring 2003 at the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University and touring through 2004, it combines an examination of the artist's career in motion photography with a survey of early attempts to photograph moving subjects. Guest curator Phillip Prodger is the primary author of the catalogue, but the book also includes a valuable essay covering cinema's earliest experiments by Tom Gunning, an acknowledged expert on early film from the University of Chicago. The exhibition will display Muybridge's zoopraxiscope and other equipment, drawings, ephemera, and photographs made from the invention of photography in the 1830s to the end of Muybridge's career, which culminated with the publication of his encyclopedic work, Animal Locomotion , in 1887. The photographs and objects are drawn largely from the collection of the Cantor Center and are supplemented with a selection of stop-action photographs from other private and public collections. Among those represented will be the work of Talbot, Rejlander, Maray, Eakins, Edison, the Lumiere Frères, and others.

Author Biography

Phillip Prodger is Assistant Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs at the Saint Louis Art Museum.

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. VII
Acknowledgments	p. X
Chronology	p. XIV
A Time and Place: Eadweard Muybridge and His Legacy	p. 2
In the Blink of an Eye: The Rise of the Instantaneous Photography Movement, 1839-78	p. 24
How to Make an Instantaneous Photograph	p. 65
Make It Stop: Muybridge and the New Frontier in Instantaneous Photography	p. 112
The First Zoopraxiscope Disc: The First Motion Picture?	p. 154
Never Seen This Picture Before: Muybridge in Multiplicity	p. 222
The Larkyns Affair	p. 258
Checklist of the Exhibition	p. 273
Selected Bibliography	p. 295
Index	p. 303
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