Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement

by Phillip Prodger

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.

Genres: Photography, Art History

328 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2003

Reviews

[Reese Avery]

A good introduction to this topic and era of photography. Thorough scholarship balanced with biography and context, with a diverse and plentiful array of images. Situates Muybridge as a photographer, technician, and showman within his century, and complicates the thesis of his being the ‘Father of Cinema’ very well, with Prodger and Gunning’s takes playing off each other nicely. This was the first full book on 19th century photography and the emergence of cinema I’ve read, and it served me just fine as a starting point.

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[Lynne J. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Part 1 reads like a virtual history of technological advances in photographic history. Shutter speed isn't mentioned until part 3. And chronography was a contribution of other photographers. Still, the 16-18 frame format for motion photography of the Silent Era was adopted by Muybridge. Nicely done.