Muybridge: Modern Media Manipulator
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Muybridge: Modern Media Manipulator
This case offers a revisionist approach to the storied photographic pioneer Eadweard Muybridge, a complicated figure whose work anticipates modern practices of motion capture, moving images, and panoramic, 360-degree viewing. While Muybridge is most renowned for his elaborate photographic records of people and animals in motion, the Clements Library possesses a singular artifact commissioned by a wealthy San Francisco couple. The album of 84 images documenting Kate and Robert Johnson’s ornate home features a rich miscellany of expansive landscapes, staged “spirit” photographs of family members, and dramatically composed interior photographs of their palatial home which capture the scope of their family, their pets, their art collection, and their innumerable possessions. As a successful commercial photographer, Muybridge published stereoscope view series ranging from images documenting the Modoc War as an official “war photographer” to tourist prints of the Isthmus of Panama, designed to inspire investment and travel. His experiments with panoramic photography yielded iconic images of pre-earthquake San Francisco. Muybridge has been described as the “father of the motion picture,” but we think he is better understood as a savvy media manipulator who understood the power of skillfully staged and altered photographic images to influence public perception.
Eadweard Muybridge, The human figure in motion: an electro-photographic investigation, London: Chapman & Hall, 1904.
Muybridge’s carefully staged instantaneous photographs of a “Woman Descending a Staircase” represents a figure in motion whom lighting makes ethereal as she turns to face the viewer, tilting the teapot toward us in the last photograph.
This album features photographs of Kate and Robert Johnson’s San Francisco mansion and “Heartsease” estate. The staged images display some of Muybridge’s preferred photographic techniques, including pseudo-spirit photographs and double exposure of clouds.
Eadweard Muybridge, “Kate and Robert Johnson photograph album”, [San Francisco], 1880.
Muybridge’s stereoscope cards offer a definite point of view on what they depict, in this case the Modoc War and the country of Panama. Viewed through a stereoscope, the spatial depth of each image is distorted, manipulating the viewer’s perception. Muybridge positioned his stereoscopic camera so that Modoc warriors aim their rifles menacingly at the viewer, an effect echoed by his image of Panama in which the train appears to approach us directly.
Eadweard Muybridge, Isthmus of Panama: Illustrated by Muybridge, San Francisco, California, 1849.
Eadweard Muybridge, “Warm Spring Indian Scouts on Picket Duty. / Illustrated by Muybridge”, San Francisco: Bradley & Rulofson, 1873.
Taken from the roof of a mansion atop Nob Hill in 1877, Muybridge captured a 360-degree panorama documenting San Francisco as it appeared before the fire and earthquake that destroyed the city in 1906. Long exposure times make a densely populated city look like an empty town.
Eadweard Muybridge, Panoramic San Francisco from California Street Hill, 1877, San Francisco, California: Thomas C. Russell, [1911].
