Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change

by Philip Brookman, Marta Braun, Corey Keller

In 1878, the Photographic Times claimed that ten minutes provided sufficient exposure for photographing a landscape. Six years earlier, an English immigrant to the West Coast named Eadweard Muybridge, going by the commercial name of Helios, had already pushed photography far in the opposite not to soak up time into pictures, but to divide time with the quickest exposures then imaginable. In 1872, the tycoon Leland Stanford had commissioned Muybridge to photograph his horse, Occident, to determine whether it ever lifted all four hooves off the ground at once. In proving that this was indeed the case, Muybridge achieved a five-hundredth-of-a-second exposure, and so began an anatomy of motion-in humans, horses, birds-that exploded the possibilities of photography and ultimately led to the development of the motion picture. Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change offers an opportunity to trace the life and art of the great photographer. In the wake of a wave of recent scholarship and renewed interest, it pitches his entire body of work against the backdrop of one of the most transformative periods of American and European history. Published to accompany a retrospective exhibition organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Helios features essays by Philip Brookman, Marta Braun, Corey Keller and Rebecca Solnit that provide a variety of new approaches to Muybridge's art and influences.Born in England, Eadweard J. Muybridge (1830-1904) moved to the United States in his early twenties, working as a bookseller for nearly ten years, until, after a stagecoach accident, he learned photography while convalescing in England. Returning to San Francisco in 1867, operating under the name of Helios, he commenced the work that was to secure his fame.

Genres: Photography

360 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2010

Reviews

[William West]

Fascinating exhibit at SFMOMA that essentially provides a complete biography of Muybridge, one of the innovators of proto-motion picture technology. His life reads like an epic allegory of the history of American cinema: He moves out west to California to seek fame and fortune as a photographer and takes startlingly beautiful compositions of Yosemite park. There, he distinguishes himself from other landscape photographers of his time by accentuating motion- in waters, clouds, wind- instead of transcendent stillness. He feigns "artistic" idiosincracy while buttering up San Francisco capitalists. Although getting caught up in a grotesque sex scandal in which he murders his wife's lover, he charms a coffee baron into letting him record the "wonders" of his Guatemalan coffee plantation, where the indiginous peoples were effectively enslaved. Muybridge, through gorgeously formal compositions, presents the plantation as order brought to the chaos of "the savages." Back in the U.S, Muybridge finds patronidge from a millionaire horse-racing enthusiast with a semi-legitimate interest in recording the nature of movement. Muybridge starts photographing galloping horses with a series of cameras, eventually from startlingly different angles, thus dissecting their physical movements. He thus acquires fame as a "scientist" who has rendered the "truth" of movement. In actuality, he re-arranges the frames into orders that look more "real" to him than their actual chronology. The cinematic illusion of indexicality is born, as is the narrativistic interpolation of the viewer/author. With popular success, Muybridge immediately turns to the "scientific" study of low-brow comic sequences and porn.