Review
Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in
a Time of Change.
Text by Philip Brookman, Rebecca Solnit, Marta Braun, and Corey Keller (London: Steidl, with Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 2010), $85.00, hb.
Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a
Time of Change places Muybridge’s
artistic and technical accomplishments
within the context of late-nineteenthcentury
American and European history.
This lavishly illustrated catalog,
with excellent production values, accompanies
a retrospective exhibition
of the same name that was organized
by the Corcoran Gallery of Art’s
chief curator Philip Brookman. The
publication features wide-ranging,
first-rate essays by Brookman, Marta
Braun, Corey Keller, and Rebecca
Solnit that investigate and interpret
Muybridge’s western landscape work
and his encyclopedic drive to catalog
locomotion.
Through words and images, the
book maps how Muybridge, who was
originally a publisher and bookseller,
established a reputation at the close
of the 1860s as a multitalented and
resourceful maker of photographic
views of the American West, including
Yosemite Valley, San Francisco,
and Alaska, under the moniker of
Helios (the sun in Greek mythology)
in which he utilized pre- and post-exposure
methods to generate dramatic
artistic effects including clouds and
moonlight.* Foreshadowing his later
involvement in finding new methods
of representing photographic time, he
also made long, ghostly exposures of
waterfalls that depict more time than
the human eye can process, thus offering
a visual representation on the
theme of variability over time. Today,
Muybridge is best known for his
massive atlas of stop-action motion
studies, Animal Locomotion, first published
in 1887.
The current catalogue text recaps
the familiar story about how these
studies began in 1872, when railroad
tycoon Leland Stanford commissioned
Muybridge to photograph his horse,
Occident, to determine whether it ever
lifted all four hooves off the ground
at once. His The Horse in Motion sequences,
which mechanically describe
and discreetly dissect action too quick
for the eye to decipher, offered proof
that this was indeed the case. In turn,
this opened the gates of perception to
his recording of motion in humans,
birds, and elephants that changed the
way people perceived the world and
provided a catalyst for the development
of motion pictures.
We also learn that long before
Photoshop, one of the most influential
photographers of the nineteenth cen47
tury elaborately hand-constructed the
images that came to be accepted as authorities
of veracity. Muybridge wanted
to formulate a visual dictionary
of human and animal locomotion for
artists. As a technically minded artist,
Muybridge was concerned with how
subjects in motion looked. He took
single images and arranged (collaged)
them to form an assemblage that was
rephotographed and printed to produce
the illusion of movement. His sequencing
techniques used persistence
of vision to encourage the belief that
the action was continuous when it was
not. Muybridge chose artistic pictorial
effect over a scientifically accurate and
complete recording of movement, and
to that end even altered the numbering
system of his negatives to construct a
sequence whose individual elements
came from different sessions. Taking
fragments and individual images, he
built elaborate narrative sequences in
which tiny stories unfolded.
While his constructions may not
be verifiably scientific for the analysis
of locomotion, Muybridge’s protocinematic
montages impacted artists,
such as Thomas Eakins, who were
interested in redefining the vocabulary
of locomotion that lay beyond the
visual threshold. His introduction of
a gridded and numbered background
allowed the space and time the subject
traveled to be scientifically and visually
defined and measured. The grid
calibrated and quantified the visual
data and mimicked the complete presentation
sequence of each subject.
This book also points out how
Muybridge’s work can provide a
window into gender roles of those
times. In his staged photographs men
perform bricklaying and carpentry
while women do the sweeping and
washing. Under a pseudoscientific
guise, Muybridge made visible what
was hidden by social convention — a
masculine, voyeuristic, erotic fantasy.
Muybridge produced more plates of
nude women than of any other subject,
covering a variety of sexual proclivities.
His small action sequences of
women kissing, taking each other’s
clothes off, pouring water down each
other’s throats, and smoking in the
nude as well as his naked men pole
vaulting, wrestling, throwing a discus,
and batting a baseball invite viewers
to vicariously join in this provocative
handiwork.
A close examination of the book’s
illustrations reveals how Muybridge
used the authority of the camera to
convince viewers that what they were
seeing was accurate, even if it did
not conform to anything they had
previously seen. Each camera image
enclosed a slice of time and space in
which formerly invisible aspects of
motion were contained. This new reality
disturbed the thinking of artists
who relied on “being true to nature”
as their guiding force. It was clear that
what was accurate could not always
be seen and that what could be seen
was not always factual. By showing us
what was once invisible, Muybridge
established that much of life is beyond
our conscious awareness — what
Walter Benjamin later called optical
unconsciousness — and that much that
had been accepted as artistic truth was
just another word for conformity.
In due course of the text, readers
can learn how Muybridge’s typological
archive presents physical bodies
as kinesthetic machines within a gridded
frame of passing time and space,
which generated a proto-cinematic
interplay between fixed and fluid moments.
His abundantly coded building
blocks of the previously invisible
expressed a new way of seeing the
physical attributes of time and motion
by compositing the real with the
imagined via photomechanical means.
Along with Étienne-Jules Marey’s
continuous, overlapping images of
locomotion, Muybridge’s vast quantities
of pictures (in this case numbers
did matter) became flowing catalysts
for the cubists and the futurists in their
quest to represent modern conceptions
of the interchange of bodily action and
time, upending models of stability and
stasis that had informed centuries of
artistic practice.
Today we can see the continued
aftereffects of Muybridge’s pictures in
DSLR cameras with 1080p video capture
that could become a game-changer
in how we make still photographs. As
the technology advances, imagemakers
could be recording high-quality, moving
sequences of “indecisive moments”
from which they would later pick out
the decisive moment(s), which would
also be subject to future revision.
Ultimately Muybridge’s constructed
still sequences, which simultaneously
synthesized life forms and
machines, remain revolutionary and
affect photographic practice because
they continue to make us stop, look,
and reconsider a dangerous human
attribute of believing in something that
ain’t so.
Also recommended: River of Shadows:
Eadweard Muybridge and the
Technological Wild West by Rebecca
Solnit, Gallop: A Scanimation Picture
Book by Rufus Butler Seder, plus the
website www.eadweardmuybridge.co.uk.
NOTES
*In what could be a significant
backstory, Weston Naef speculates
whether or not Muybridge had the
expertise to make these images and
could other photographers, particularly
Carleton Watkins, have made the
photographs that Muybridge published
under Helios. See Tyler Green's
Modern Art Notes at http://blogs.artinfo.com/modernartnotes/2010/06/only-on-man-the-newest-eadweardmuybridge-mystery.
© Robert Hirsch
Robert Hirsch is a former CEPA
Gallery Director and a member of
Light Work and ƒ295. His latest book,
Exploring Color Photography: From
Film to Pixels, fifth edition, was published
earlier this year. For more information
about his visual and written
projects visit www.lightresearch.net. |
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