MAN IN MOTION

THE MAN WHO TOOK A STEP TOWARDS THE MOVING IMAGE

The pioneer photographer Eadweard Muybridge is presented at Stockholm's Dance Museum 11th March – 1st May 2005

The British born photographer Eadweard Muybridge ( Edward Muggeridge, 1830–1904) became celebrated in the late 19^th century for his studies of men and animals in motion – his epochmaking series were realized when he devised a method of photographing for instance a horse in motion by setting up several cameras whose shutters clicked when the horse tripped a wire. The result stunned the world, not only for its scientific implications but for its aesthetic appeal as well. The human eye had never before been able to exactly see how a horse moves his feet. When Muybridge arrived in Paris in 1881 from the US, where his experiments were carried out, and showeed his series of images of horses in movement, it created a sensation among scientists, painters and sculptors, who would have to reconsider the long  accepted academic pattern of a trotting or galopping horse.

The publication of Muybridge's picture album Animal Locomotion in 1887 offered more study material for artists. Muybridge's studies of men and animals in motion kept a profound and enduring influence on the visual arts during the last century – from Italian futurists like Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini to Marcel Duchamp and a contemporary giant as Francis Bacon, who in Muybridge's work found inspiration to some of his most captivating paintings. In 1983 the American minimalist composer Philip Glass relied on Muybridge's life and work to create his theatre piece The photographer.

Muybridge's landmark series of motion studies have a cinematic quality. His 1879 invention of the zoopraxiscope, a primitive motion-picture machine that produced stop-action photographs in  quick sequences and created an illusion of movement, was one of the early contributions that gave birth to the motion picture in 1895. Motion-picture pioneers as the Lumière brothers and Thomas Edison have all recognized his innovative tribute to the moving image. Many modern photographers and film-makers have been influenced by Muybridge and this is probably why his studies remain very contemporary.

Muybridge's early experimental observation of human and animal motion also contains a visual poetry that still fascinates, although more than hundred and thirty years have passed since he started his work and a century since he died in 1904.

The exhibition, presented in collaboration with Laurence Miller Gallery in New York, is on view at the Dansmuseet in Stockholm 11 March – 1 May 2005.

Admission 40 SEK