Eadweard Muybridge: the Horse in Motion - Empirical Accuracy, Reductive Views, & Notion of Class

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Eadweard Muybridge: The Horse In Motion Empirical Accuracy, Reductive Views, & Notion of Class This paper concerns Eadweard Muybridge’s photograph The Horse In Motion, which dates from June 19th, 1878 (Fig. 1). This was one from a series of sequence photographs that Muybridge took for former governor of California Leland Stanford in 1872. Stanford commissioned Muybridge in hopes of deciphering whether all four feet of a horse were off the ground at the same time while the magnificent animal was in motion. Taken at speeds up to 1/2000th of a second, this true action image shows a horse photographed in typical actions against ruled backgrounds. While the image itself is at once empirically accurate in that it captures something that is beyond the capacity of the unaided human eye to observe, it is also something that is very much so a construct. The photograph is taken not only in the sense of what is framed, but also in a set up to capture a reductive view of motion. In this, Muybridge’s photograph shares a selective rendering of reality undergirded by a notion of class. Action was not documented in the earliest photographs. A critic in 1839 even went as far to state that moving objects “can never be delineated without the aid of memory.” Yet recording the sequential images of The Horse In Motion, Eadweard Muybridge’s black and white action photographs proved in the 1870s the notion that for a split second horse’s legs leave the ground all at once (Fig. 1). With the arrangement of twelve photographs that composed The Horse In Motion as proof, the ancient convention of the critic’s claim above fell undone (Fig. 1). Organizing the images of the moving horse in rows and columns according to the order in which they were taken, Muybridge’s action photographs uncovered his audience to a majestic side of the horse that the eye alone could not, and still to this

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