We live in an age unprecedented in history when animated images bombard us from all sides. Television, cinema, internet and computer generated images, home video - the capture of images is now everywhere all around us all of the time. An ealy pioneer of the moving image was Eadweard Muybridge (9 April 1830 – 8 May 1904) who was an English photographer whose photographic studies of motion and in motion-picture projection predates film. He adopted the name Eadweard Muybridge, believing it to be the original Anglo-Saxon form of his name. He emigrated to the United States in 1855. In San Francisco Muybridge started a career as a publisher's agent for the London Printing and Publishing Company, and as a bookseller.
In 1860 he murdered his much younger wife's lover and the man suspected of fathering their child. He was acquitted on the grounds of it being a 'justifiable homicide' and went on to become an innovator of the moving image. An early forerunner of the movie camera Muybridge invented the Zoopraxiscope for projecting moving images. This larger than life figure has since become the subject of Philip Glass opera The Photographer with a libretto based in part on court transcripts from the murder case.
Here is some of Muybridge's ground breaking images from the Victorian era.
Here is some of Muybridge's ground breaking images from the Victorian era.
While the clothed and unclothed human form was one of the first moving images to be captured and has always been fascinating to a large audience of voyeurs worldwide, Muybridge also presented sequenced photos of a variety of animals, The bison animation here is taken from one of Muybridges's original studies:-
Here is one of his Zoopraxiscope compilations of a boy jumping:-
And again here is another sequence from a sword fencing scene by Eadweard Muybridge in 1887 - owned by
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. .
Combat, sex, murder, violence so what is new on the movie scene after150 or so years, well not a lot really.
Here is an extract from the Glass opera, Act 1 called 'A Gentelman's Honor' about our homicidal image maker's court case and his acquittal on the basis of his presumed right as a husband and as a gentleman to kill his wife's adulterous lover. Enjoy!
I commented on this and the comment disappeared........ gah
ReplyDeleteOh No! I wonder what happened to it Lia? Thanks anyway :-(
DeleteVery interesting video rendition of Muybridge's works, AA, the music for both video selections are dead-on perfect.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if the influence of San Francisco and its wide open reputation in the 1860's and its bohemian lifestyle might have effected Muyridge? It was a metropolis that grew up overnight (well, in a few years), fortunes came and went, The Civil War left Northern California largely untouched except for a bit of partisan wrangling city, and, all in all, people reinvented themselves as Americans (especially the most recent arrivals) still do.
It was a city of colorful characters, for certain, not least of which being a young newspaperman Samuel Longhorne Clemens, known better by the nom be plume of Mark Twain. Being late of the silver mines of Virginia City, Nevada, Twain arrived around 1865 to the city, desperate for a job. He was a "beat" reporter digging up and writing news tidbits, everything from mocking the fancy soirees of the Nob Hill new rich to deploring the flogging of "Chinamen" by angry white bigots. He also began ar second career as a lecturer and public humorist. I can't help wondering if these two creative pioneers met?
It is interesting to me that Muyridge's work came right about the same time that artists like Edward Manet were scandalizing Paris salons and "official art" critics with their realistic and modern depictions of female nudity. These stark moving photographs reveal already, as you surmise, the roots of cinema's preoccupation with bedroom actions, violence and a bit of spectacle with that bison. All you need is wait a few decades for Cecil B. DeMille to add a bit of piety in between seductions and orgies and we're off to the races toward Hollywood!
Thanks for these interesting early photographic and video and musical blends, AA.
Thanks for commenting Doug, I'm glad you enjoyed the videos. I think you are right to suggest that living in San Francisco provided Muybridge with new opportunities only available because he was at the right place at the right time.
ReplyDeleteThe gold fired prosperity of California gave him a foothold as a photographer of Yosemite Valley and was the springboard to his later adventures in New Orleans and New York City, before his acquired brain injury unlocked some creative energy that meant by the time he returned to San Francisco in 1867 he was already a well established professional photographer, one of a new breed. He was close again to another murder scene when in in 1873 Muyridge was commissioned by the US Army to photograph the Modoc War in your present neck of the woods I think Doug.
This time it was the Modoc warriors who murdered the US peace envoys in cold blood, but Muybridge must have felt at home amongst the homicidal Modoc braves.
He was an amazing man, he returned to England in 1894 where he lived out the last 10 years of his life lecturing but also returning briefly to his alma mater the University of Pennsylvania to conclude unfinished business at the age of 66.
Mubridge was the star of his own proto-film and a prophet of the coming Age of the Image. His work on motion is of historic importance I think. It is interesting in straight laced Victorian era he had no trouble finding people willing to bare all to the camera.
During his 2010 retrospective exhibition at London's Tate Modern one critic wrote =
"Muybridge’s great achievement was conceptual; he made people stop and look for the first time at the elements of motion. He pioneered the study of locomotion an eye opener for both the arts and science. He is the granddaddy of cinema and for that we should all thank him."
http://www.offscreenmagazine.co.uk/artwork/eadweard-muybridge-at-tate-britain/
You're quite right about Muybridge and his connection to the US Army during The Modoc War. It was the only Indian War I believe were a General (Canby) was killed--in an act of treachery during a peace parley near the Lava Caves by some of the younger Modocs. The area of lava tubes and caves and natural trenches were a perfect fortress for the native peoples. Much blood was spilled on both sides before it was over, of course. The Lave Beds are now a US National Monument. Thanks for those links AA.
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