Eadweard Muybridge – Jumping Over a Boy’s Back {Leapfrog} from the Animal Locomotion series (1872-1985)
Like any good art student, I hear Muybridge and experience a Pavlovian response where Horse in Motion pops into my head.
And it’s not a bad association but I tend to think of Muybridge as a scientist who used photography as his laboratory.
Unfortunately, that’s been a barrier to really exploring his work. It’s not that I don’t like science, it’s more that I struggle with thinking of a photograph as evidence. Or, as Wolfgang Tillmans has correctly observed: “photography always lies about what is in front of the camera but never lies about what is behind.”
I feel like that’s actually the perfect quote to contextualize Muybridge. Yes: his work leads with a rigorous precision. However, I feel like that’s maybe more a statement about Muybridge’s personality than an accurate account as the scope, form or function of his work.
During a lecture earlier this week I was shocked at the sensual, Whitman-esque humanism of some of his work. Like some of it is straight up erotic in it’s obsessive fixation on an effort to measure the differences between motion as we perceive it and motion as an amalgam of discrete, constituent parts.
This isn’t the best example but I couldn’t find the one from the lecture–but I still think this is pretty damn daring, actually.
Also, Rebecca Solnit–one of our best living essayist–wrote a biography on him. I started reading it a while back but didn’t finish because it started to get into the scientific facets of the work that just presented an obstacle to my engaging with the proceedings. I suspect I am going to have to revisit it when I have some free time. (And who the hell knows when that’ll be… going to grad school FT and working FT is rough, y’all.)
Acetylene Eyes 