The man who froze time

One of the most memorable moments during the recent 2024 ICC T20 World Cup was when India’s Suryakumar Yadav pulled off an unbelievable catch to send South African batsman David Miller back to the pavilion. Yadav’s catch was incredible — he managed to catch the ball, fling it high, step over the boundary line, and then leap back into the playing area to complete the dismissal. The entire sequence went viral on social media, with videos of the catch surfacing from various angles.

Watching that catch on TV, it was hard not to reflect on the pioneering work of Eadweard Muybridge, who was the first person to capture a series of images on camera. His revolutionary contributions to motion studies and high-speed photography laid the foundation for the advancement of cinema and animation.

In 1872, Leland Stanford, a railroad tycoon and avid racehorse owner, hired Muybridge to take pictures of his favourite horse, Occident, while trotting. He wanted the photographer to freeze the horse’s movement in a split second, an unthinkable idea at the time. Stanford wanted to prove his theory that in the galloping of a horse, there was a split second when all four legs were in the air. The initial efforts resulted in fuzzy pictures. In April 1873, Muybridge claimed to have successfully photographed ‘Occident’ in motion, but the response was not enthusiastic.

During the next few years, Muybridge pursued other projects and travelled to distant places. Finally, in 1877, he succeeded in photographing a horse in full gallop by employing a camera with a shutter that opened and closed in just two thousandths of a second.

The following year, on 19 June 1878, he photographed the movement of another of Stanford’s thoroughbred mares, Sallie Gardner. Muybridge constructed a makeshift structure along the race track at Stanford’s Farm in Palo Alto to house 12 cameras capable of operating at high shutter speeds. The outcome was a series of twelve photographs taken over half a second, representing a remarkable milestone in the history of photography. This was the very first instance in which a photographer had effectively captured such precise real-time motion.

Earliest filmmakers

Muybridge’s sequence of images dramatically and creatively froze time, revealing intricate details that were previously hidden. His work delighted Stanford, as it validated his hypothesis by showing all four legs of a trotting horse suspended in the air at a precise moment.

In 1879, Muybridge expanded his research by deploying 24 cameras to capture a diverse range of images of horses, other animals, and male athletes. In 1880, he invented the ‘Zoopraxiscope’, a device capable of projecting moving images created from sequences of photographs taken by multiple cameras capturing different stages of motion.

This innovative device, which displayed moving images, is widely regarded as a crucial precursor to the modern movie projector. This breakthrough propelled Muybridge to produce masterpieces like ‘Sallie Gardner at a Gallop’ (also known as ‘The Horse in Motion’), firmly establishing him as one of the earliest filmmakers in the world.

Between 1883 and 1886, Muybridge and his team captured over 100,000 photographs in many sequences.

While animals (including those borrowed from the Philadelphia Zoo) walked across a stage in the outdoor studio, human subjects (mostly unclothed models of both genders) were assigned tasks such as —walking, jumping, running, dancing, carrying things, and so on. The resulting collection of nearly 20,000 photographs was reproduced in the renowned ‘Animal Locomotion’ publication of 1887. This significant work featuring 781 plates distributed across 11 volumes was sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania. Even today, this masterful compilation remains an essential resource for art, photography, and history enthusiasts.

Enduring fascination

Scholars and historians widely recognise the significant impact of Muybridge’s photography work on contemporary visual culture.

“What sets Muybridge’s work apart is that it was the first scientific study to utilise photography in a novel way,” explains Joseph-James Ahern, senior archivist at the University of Pennsylvania.

“Previous photography mainly consisted of simple poses or landscapes, but Muybridge’s work enabled people to observe physical activities and understand how the human body functions.”

Among many important artists who admired Muybridge greatly were British painters Francis Bacon (1909-1992) and David Hockney (born 1937). “My principal source of visual information is Muybridge,” admitted Bacon. “His work is unbelievably precise. He created a visual dictionary of movement, a living dictionary.”  Similarly, Hockney believed that “Muybridge’s books were such an incredible repository of images for artists to use, every art school had a copy of The Human Figure in Motion.”

Writer, curator, artist and educator David Campany feels that Muybridge’s studies of human and animal locomotion, made in the 1870s and 1880s, are exceptional. “They changed things forever and have come to symbolise modernity’s seismic and irreversible shifts in the understanding of vision, the living body, nature, science and art.”