Eadward Muybridge: Seeing Industrial Revolution and Economic Collapse, Frame by Frame

In her book Motion Studies: Time, Space and Eadweard Muybridge, Rebecca Solnit writes that one of the most common phrases of the late 19th century was “the annihilation of time and space.” The steamship, the telegraph, the railroad — what Emerson called “one web” of a “thousand various threads” — and the photograph each played a role in destroying older notions of time and place. But as Solnit suggests, at heart of this annihilation was a conviction that viewed “the terms of our bodily existence as burdensome,” and that believed technology could do for us what our bodies couldn't.

You can’t get better evidence for this burdensome body than the photographs that Muybridge made of Leland Stanford’s white racehorse Occident. The animal’s body was carved into a sequence of 24 silhouetted images that record the graceful form of the animal’s gait. These motion studies, as they are known, were a first of their kind and were a precursor to the moving image. Because of Muybridge’s motion studies, we learned that for a split second, a galloping horse has all four hooves off the ground — a reality never witnessed before. Muybridge photographed Occident at Stanford’s Palo Alto estate in the spring of 1872 with the aim of improving the racehorse’s performance. Using a sequence of cameras set along a marked path, Muybridge transformed the body of the animal into an object frozen in time to be studied and improved. The symbolic force of the railroad millionaire turning his prized racehorse into a series of mechanical images cannot be overstated. And it was Muybridge who enacted this feat of industrial will.

That same spring, as Occident went running along a numbered path, small banks that served middle-class and working-class patrons were failing across Europe due to dodgy loans, speculative lending practices, and the excessive costs of the Franco-Prussian War. By the fall of 1873 the crisis reached the U.S., plunging even the robust American economy into what contemporaries called “The Great Depression” — a name that stuck until the 1930s. The U.S. economy faltered to a large extent through bond speculations by railroad corporations. Stanford and his colleagues at the Central Pacific Railroad played the market game well. It all sounds familiar and contemporary, doesn’t it?

This thought struck me while walking through the recent exhibit of Muybride’s work at London’s Tate Britain. The retrospective opened amidst new austerity programs in the U.K. The right-leaning coalition government announced drastic cuts in public spending, slashing budgets for cultural institutions and universities, cutting back on social services, setting up plans to sell off forest lands that have been protected since the Magna Carta. Last spring in Washington, D.C., Muybridge’s sepia landscapes and innovative motion studies captivated patrons at the Corcoran Gallery not far from where Congress debated bank regulations and cuts in social programs. But those are political questions, and the Muybridge exhibit was about art, and the particular passions and inventions of a man who pioneered the science of photography. As the exhibition showed so well, Muybridge motion studies were about the experience of stopping time, and turning motion into mechanical reproduction. The show didn’t mention the 19th-century economic collapse. Maybe it didn’t want to remind us that industrialization and the annihilation of time and space had it collateral damage.

Stanford’s racehorse was only the first step, for the motion studies would consume Muybridge as he increasingly saw the camera as a tool of science and himself as a scientist. He would pursue this work in San Francisco and later in Philadelphia, and he would lecture on his studies across the U.S. and Europe. Beyond his initial studies of horses, there were other animals: pigs and dogs and cows, and wild animals from zoos.