Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement

By Phillip Prodger

Book Overview

Eadweard Muybridge, one of the great pioneer-innovators of the 19th century, is a familiar figure to students of art history, photography, and cinema. Best known for the photographs of horses and other animals in motion that he made in the 1870s and '80s, Muybridge was the first person to use photography to freeze rapid action for analysis and study. He devised a method for photographing episodes of behavior using a series of cameras, producing some of the most famous sequential photographs ever made. These pictures, the first successful photographs of rapidly moving subjects, revolutionized expectations of what photography could reveal about the natural world, and ultimately led to the invention of the motion picture in the mid-1890s.

Time Stands Still is the catalogue that accompanies a major exhibition celebrating Muybridge's fascinating work. Though the instantaneous photography movement stands as a crucial event in the progression of photography to motion pictures, this exhibition represents the first major organized treatment of the subject. Opening in spring 2003 at the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University and touring through 2004, it combines an examination of the artist's career in motion photography with a survey of early attempts to photograph moving subjects. Guest curator Phillip Prodger is the primary author of the catalogue, but the book also includes a valuable essay covering cinema's earliest experiments by Tom Gunning, an acknowledged expert on early film from the University of Chicago. The exhibition will display Muybridge's zoopraxiscope and other equipment, drawings, ephemera, and photographs made from the invention of photography in the 1830s to the end of Muybridge's career, which culminated with the publication of his encyclopedic work, Animal Locomotion, in 1887.

The photographs and objects are drawn largely from the collection of the Cantor Center and are supplemented with a selection of stop-action photographs from other private and public collections. Among those represented will be the work of Talbot, Rejlander, Maray, Eakins, Edison, the Lumiere Fr res, and others.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195149645
• ISBN13: 9780195149647
• Release Date: November 2003
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 328 Pages
• Weight: 6.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 8.3" x 11.2"

Customer Reviews

An explosive and innovative photographic history

I have been drawn to the photographs of Eadweard Muybride since childhood -- the jumping horses, running goats etc. have always fascinated me -- but here the author does much better than simply repeat these incredible photographs. He tells you what happened before Muybridge came on the scene; the incredible struggles and sneaky tricks used to make pictures that looked like motion frozen in time. The book is very easy to read - serious, but written in a breezy style that is very accessible. I would recommend this for any history of photography or cinema student. It goes into depth about things that have really never been studied before. Very provocative, highly educational, and very entertaining.