Muybridge: Series Photography
June 15, 1878 a man has rigged 12 still cameras along the Palo Alto racetrack in San Francisco. A bet has been made over the nature of a horse at full gallop. Photographer, Eadweard Muybridge (1830 – 1904) has been hired, by Leland Stanford the former Governor of California, to prove that a horse will leave contact with the ground when running at full speed. It took Muybridge six years of research to develop the technology that would spur the “instantaneous photography” movement. Jockey Abe Edgington led his horse down the track at a blazing speed, little did he know that he would be a part of some of the most famous and important photographs in the world. On that June day the theory of cinema was conceived.
Before Muybridge was approached by Stanford cameras were “balky… with wooden shutters and insensitive glass-plate negatives” (Olsen, 1). They required long exposure times, as a result the subject needed to remain still. Muybridge “modified the emulsions on the glass-plate negatives, making them more reactive to light”, he also replaced the wooden shutters with metal, electric-operated shutters (Olsen, 1).
Muybridge lined the racetrack with 12 of these modified cameras (each one 21 inches apart) and connected them to tripwires. As the horse ran by, it tripped the wires, which set off the camera it was connected to. Muybridge developed the plates on the spot and “produced a series of photographs showing the horse virtually stride by stride” (Olsen, 1). Indeed Muybridge proved that a horse, at full gallop, will have all four hooves off the ground
Muybridge’s importance to cinema is the idea of capturing an event as it happens. He captured movement in time. It is the idea of photographing how things move that proves important later. While Muybridge never thought to create a camera that could take multiple photographs in succession; that invention went to Hannibal Goodwin who “first used celluloid roll film as a basis for light-sensitive emulsions” (Cook, 4). It is the work of photographic pioneers such as Muybridge that allows people such as W.K.L. Dickinson, Thomas Edison, and Auguste and Louis Lumiere to develop the camera technology that will drive the creation of cinema; which evolves through Edwin S. Porter and Georges Melies to become modern cinema, but who were these pioneers of cinema who turned photography into cinematography?
