Eadweard Muybridge: Studies in Locomotion

October 4 - December 16, 2005
Wolcott Gallery

Eadweard Muybridge (England, 1830-1904) is renowned for his pioneering series of photographs documenting human and animal locomotion. Muybridge, who emigrated to the America in 1852 and later worked for the landscape photographer Carleton E. Watkins, first garnered attention in the late 1860s for a series of dramatic views of Yosemite Valley. In 1872, Muybridge was hired by Leland Stanford, former governor of California, to settle a wager regarding the movement of a trotting horse's legs: at issue was whether all four of the horse's hooves were ever simultaneously off the ground. Fascinated by the problem of stopping motion, Muybridge in the following decade developed an array of photochemical techniques and sophisticated mechanical devices that enabled him to break down complex kinetic movements into a revealing sequence of still photographs. His innovative designs included a shutter that could open and close at the then unheard of speed of 1/1000 of a second and a system of 12 cameras triggered electro-magnetically by strings stretched across the ground. During this time, Muybridge also invented the "zoopraxiscope," an optical instrument that projected his motion study photographs as moving pictures.

After highly-publicized European and American tours, Muybridge broke with Stanford. In 1884, the University of Pennsylvania commissioned Muybridge to continue his project under their auspices. In the next three years, Muybridge took more than 30,000 images using three cameras, each equipped with a timer-controlled shutter and thirteen lenses, which allowed him to photograph his subjects simultaneously from the front, side, and rear. In 1887, Muybridge published an eleven-volume, 781-plate set that featured humans and animals engaged in an wide-ranging assortment of activities. This landmark publication not only transformed the way we understand locomotion, but also how artists depicted movement in their work.

This exhibition features a sampling of Muybridge's groundbreaking locomotion studies, generously loaned to the Museum by Special Collections at UVM's Bailey/Howe Library.