In this blog post I will focus on my research into the history and theory animation as pertains to Eadweard Muybridge, one of the earliest pioneers of animation.
My original interest in researching Eadweard Muybridge came from quite an unusual direction. Since September I have been working on a project with Lysander Wong where we have been on a mission to create knitted animation. This project was sparked by a shared interest in knitting and textiles, as well as animating with unconventional materials.
For the project we used arguably Muybridge’s most famous photo sequence as a reference for our own animation. This is the very famous sequence of a horse running. This reference was perfect to help us create a clear movement sequence for our project, and also made me interested in researching Muybridge further.
MUYBRIDGE
In my research into Muybridge I found the text At the Edge of Sight : Photography and the Unseen by Shawn Michelle Smith, which I found to be a really invaluable resource.
It was from this text that I found out that Muybridge’s work in photographing movement first started at the request of a racehorse breeder, Leland Stanford, who wanted to understand the gait of his horses, so he could improve their performance at the track.
It is this desire to understand movement and break down what can’t normally be perceived by the human eye which incapsulated Muybridge’s motion studies. They are a sort of demystifying of something that at the time was an unknown, which from a modern perspective is hard to comprehend.
As Smith writes: “They enable one to perceive elements in the visual field that generally pass before the eye unnoticed, making one aware of invisible worlds and ordinary blindness.”
To achieve this feat Muybridge had a design and pioneer an entirely new method of photography. He created a track of up to 36 cameras, in groups of 12, spaced evenly apart. The cameras also had to be positioned at different angles so movements could be recorded from all sides.
I hadn’t considered before just how arduous this entire process would have been when you factor in the traditional manual photography processes of the time.
Once the photos were taken the process then began of making negatives, printing cyanotype proofs, selecting negatives for enlargement, and then printing these photo sequences. Not to mention re-photographing and making collotype printing plates so that images could be transferred to paper as prints.
“Muybridge presented his human motion studies under the collective title Animal Locomotion in 1887, and the final publication included 781 plates (562 of human subjects) assembled from 19,347 single negatives.” – Smith
Cultural Context and Racism
In my research I also found it very important to learn more about how Muybridge and his work were directly involved with and linked to white-supremacy and eugenicist movements of the time period.
Espeth Brown notes that to William Pepper, who was a member of Muybridge’s advisory committee: “the development of the white, male student body was directly linked to white racial progress.”
Smith notes that as “Elite athletes photographed at the height of their youth and health, Muybridge’s male models represent the “champions” of the [white] race”
I think it’s very important to remember the cultural context tied to artist and figures that we study, and to be informed about these facets of historical artefacts, so as to not white-wash or misrepresent them as divorced from their very real histories of colonialism, and white-supremacy.
Sources:
Smith, Shawn Michelle. At the Edge of Sight : Photography and the Unseen, Duke University Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ual/detail.action?docID=1603733.
Brown, Elspeth. “Racialising the Virile Body: Eadweard Muybridge’s Locomotion Studies 1883– 1887.” Gender and History 17, no. 3 (November 2005): 627– 56.
More photographs from the process of me and Lysander’s knitted animation project.