The photographer,
inventor, and showman Eadweard Muybridge is best known for his 1878 motion
studies of horses, but his achievements in photography range far beyond that enduring
experiment. He first came to prominence for his expansive vistas of the
American West, especially the Yosemite Valley, as well as his richly detailed
studies of clouds. In 1873, the US Army commissioned him to document the Modoc
War then being waged against the Native American tribes in the craggy
lava beds of southern Oregon and northern California. These images were widely
reproduced in newspapers, representing an early example of photojournalism from
the front. In 1877-1878, Muybridge produced his 360-degree panoramas of San Francisco in
thirteen adjacent photographs (see here for a reproduction)—an
astonishing technological feat that still plays dizzying tricks on the
imagination.
The genesis of the motion
studies famously came about when railroad magnate and horse breeder Leland
Stanford deigned to settle whether all four of a trotting horse’s hooves are ever off the
ground at the same moment. Muybridge’s ingenious solution was to
set up a line of wet collodion cameras alongside Stanford's horse track. Each of these had
a shutter ready to snap as soon as the horse tripped a thread, thereby
producing the famous serial images of a horse’s stride.
(Courtesy Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries)
Once Muybridge
successfully split apart the precise components of movement, contemporaries began
to wonder whether it would be possible to reanimate the original motion. Enter the delightfully named zoopraxiscope (initially called
the zoogyroscope). Muybridge did not seek a patent on his machine, likely owing
to the fact that it was an amalgamation of existing technologies such
as the magic lantern, phenakistoscope, and zoetrope. Muybridge was accustomed to showing his motion studies as slide lectures, and so he naturally wanted to marry the phenakistoscope's rudimentary persistence of vision to a more
public model of projection. The animation technology may have already existed,
but supplying it with photographs snapped in rapid succession produced
something radically new.
(Copyright held by Kingston Museum and Heritage Service)
In short, the
zoopraxiscope consisted of a projecting lantern; rotating glass discs with the
motion studies’ silhouettes spinning along the perimeter; and a slotted disc
set to rotate in the opposite direction to create the intermittence
necessary for the persistence of vision. The original images were re-photographed in an elongated form so as to correct the projector's distortion. These prints were then traced onto the glass discs in silhouette so as to be more readily visible. This short video created in conjunction with a
2010 Muybridge exhibition at the Kingston Museum offers an excellent demonstration of the process.
After Muybridge first
presented the zoopraxiscope for the San Francisco Art Association on May 4,
1880, a local reporter wrote that “Nothing was wanting but the clatter of hoofs
upon the turf and an occasional breath of steam to make the spectator believe
he had before him the flesh and blood steeds” (Haas, 120). It’s difficult for
us to fathom this initial wonder at seeing photographs move. Muybridge’s
zoopraxiscope is widely recognized as one of the key precursors to the film projector. To be
sure, cinema as we know it couldn’t have come about without the innovation of
flexible film stock. This advance made the rapid exposure and projection of
serial images far less cumbersome than Muybridge’s methods. But
it was the zoopraxiscope that first gave audience a taste for the thrill of moving
photographs. Today, Muybridge seems an especially vivid embodiment of early
photography’s split allegiance to scientific observation and popular entertainment.
For more on Muybridge and
the zoopraxiscope see:
Haas,
Robert Bartlett. Muybridge: Man in Motion. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1976.
Solnit,
Rebecca. River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild
West. New York: Viking, 2003.
Kingston
Museum Collection: http://www.kingston.gov.uk/browse/leisure/museum/collections/muybridge.htm
Stephen
Herbert zoopraxiscope project:
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