Eadweard Muybridge Motion Study Motion Studies

The source of imagery I’m using in this project comes from Eadweard Muybridge, a photographer who, in 1872, developed a way to photograph animals in motion by setting up a row of 12-20 cameras that photographed an animal when it tripped a cable that released the shutter as it moved past his lens. He continued and refined this practice for 2 decades, eventually moving from animals to humans, frequently photographed naked. In this work I am bringing together disparate historical processes. Eadweard Muybridge’s bank of cameras that he used in the mid 19th century is remarkably similar to the contemporary flatbed scanner in that both photograph objects directly in front of them over a fixed space. Though Muybridge was primarily interested in arresting motion of his subjects, he inadvertently created moving pictures. I’m taking Muybridge’s static interpretation of motion and reanimating them as a Graphic Interchange Format (GIF) and then reinterpreting that motion through modern photographic processes. That is to say I’ve scanned his photographs and made them into a GIF which I run through a tablet and place face down on a flatbed scanner. His unwilling 20 framed movie is reduced to a single frame of these mechanically juxtaposed images. The pixels of the tablet are visible in the scans and the process is laid bare. Similarly, Muybridge’s images had markings on them, writing, dust and other evidence of their creation.