1881 Eadward Muybridge - "The Attitudes of Animals in Motion" (Chapter 1: Horses)

In 1878 and 1879 Muybridge shot photographic sequences of animals in motion at the Palo Alto race track in California. In1881 he puplished a selection of the results in a hand-made folio book of circa 15 copies entitled "The Attitudes of Animals in Motion". The first chapter (which is presented in animated form in this video) contains 73 plates with 6 to 24 pictures per plate depicting horses moving across the track. Muybridge meticulously composed the plates by cropping the negatives into clear and consistent frames and placing them in a logical progressive order. He also retouched the horses in many pictures to show not much more than contours. The instantaneous photographs could not offer the detail of his 'still' photography works. He enhanced the different esthetic quality of dark contours against the very light background of a white wall in the Californian sun, making the positions of the horse's legs even clearer.

In 1877 Muybridge had started photographing horses with 12 cameras with electro-magnetic shutters triggered by the horse or the wheel of a sulky as it made contact with wires stretched across the track. By 1879 he started using 24 cameras and sometimes used a clock-work to regulate the exposures.

Six of the sequences had already been published in several widespread editions of cabinet cards in 1878. Many newspapers and magazines also reported on Muybridge's work, sometimes including his pictures as a zoetrope strip. A demonstration with a zoetrope in a shop window was reported to attract crowds. From 1880 onwards Muybridge showed several sequences in lectures with his Zoogyroscope (later called Zoöpraxiscope) which projected drawings based on his photographs. At the Chicago 1893 World's Columbian Exposition a "Zoopraxographical Hall" was built in the "Midway Plaisance" arm of the exposition to show moving images to a paying public. The Zoopraxographical Hall was arguably the very first commercial movie theater ever built, more than two years before the Lumiere brothers projected their first movies for a paying audience. However, Ottomar Anschütz had been projecting his own photographic sequences with a more or less similar device since 1886, drawing 15.000 paying customers at the Ausstellungspark in Berlin in 1887 and touring through the United States in 1888 and 1889. And Charles-Émile Reynaud showed his animations to a total of more than 500.000 paying customers between October 1892 and 1900 at the Musée Grévin in Paris.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• magical motion museum
• muybridge
• 1881
• attitudes
• of
• animals
• in
• motion
• horses
• chronophotography
• sequence
• photography
• pre-cinema
• early
• first
• film
• movie

[danyfischer67777]

De magnifiques documents