frampton Muybridge

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EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE:FRAGMENTS OF A

TESSERACT"It is the artist who is truthful and it is photography which lies, lor in reality

time does not stop."-. Auguste Rodin, 1911

HRE IS AN irksome paradox of public consciousness: to be. accorded the status of a legend is to be whittled down to amicroscopic point, a nonentity at the intersection of a random hand-ful of idiosyncrasies, tidbits of gossip, shreds of advertising copy.To the nonspecialist, Rene Descartes was the philosopher of a

.single motto (just three little words ... and in Latin, no less). Hedidn't like to ,get out of bed in the-morning (rhymes with Belacqua,Oblornov, Beckett). His taste in eggs was, to put it mildly, revolting.That Descartes presides over a truly exquisite adventure of the mind,the marriage of geometry with algebra, is mere impedimenta forscholars to attend to.Bearrix Potter, a savante of mycology whose theories of symbiosis

have recen tly found vindication, i s : known to some of us, at least, asthe authoress of Peter Rabbit, illustrated; ignorant of her cir-cllmst~lnces} we miss the satire in the little books.


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The Reverend C.L. Dodgson, a crucial figure in the developmentof mathematical logic, inventor of a device for recording dreams,photographic portraitist of Victorian celebrities and young girls, issurvived in public memory by his literary persona, Lewis Carrol].And of the extraordinary man who chose to call himself Ead-weard Muybridge, we learn in school only that he was' hired as atechnician, by a California nabob, to settle a colossal wager over,whether a galloping horse, at any instantin its stride, has all four feetoff the ground.The story is almost certainly a fabrication: Leland Stanford Was

keen enough on horseflesh, and took a vast interest in the 'scientifictraining' of trotters, but h was neither essentially frivolous nor agambler. Nor could the single incident explain the ensuing decade ofpersonal friendship between Stanford and Muybridge, during whichStanford gave his fnll support to projects having precious little to dowith horses, opening to the photographer the engineering facilitiesof the Central Pacific Railroad, and even providing legal defensewhen Muybridge stood trial for his life. .Eadweard Muybridge was forty-two years old when the associa-

tion began, with the first 'inconclusive' photographs of the champi-on trotter Occident, so we can hardly assume that he sprang, fullyarmed, from the browof his personal Maecenas. How, then, are weto account for his extending the commission into a lifework? Theeleven folio volumes of Animal Locomotion, comprising many hun-dreds of photographic sequences, show men, women, childrendomestic and wild animals and birds -and even amputees, and per-sons suffering from n ervous disorders -engaged in hundreds of dif-ferent activities: they constitute a unique monument that is clearlythe work of a man obsessed. And his zoopraxiscope, a machine forresynthesizing the illusion of motion from the analytic images pro-vided by his batteries of sequential still cameras, established Muy-bridge as the inventor of the photographic cinema.Four generations of artists, of the most diverse persuasions, have

acknowledged the fascination of his work, and it is obvious thatmany have learned from it, i f only at second or third hand: thatalone justifies our curiosity about the genesis of his sensibility .

Enter Edward James Muggeridge, on April 9, 1830. He is supposedto have received a good education. Local tradition held Kingston to


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EADWEARD MUYBRJDC~~ I;'RAGMNTS OF A TESSERACT 71

have been an ancient seat of Saxon royalty. In 1850, the CoronationStone (I'm told that half the towns in England boast one) was set upin the Market Square, upon a hexagonal plinth engraved with thenames of the kings crowned there. Two of the six were Eaclweard theElder (900 A.D.) and Eadweard the Martyr (975 A.D.).Muggeridge, an East Anglian version of Mod-Rydd, an Old Norsename with magical associations, was Less pliable. But a muy hadonce been a dry measure of grain; the elder Muggeridge, who diedwhen the boy was thirteen, had been a cornchandlet. Exit then, atabout the age of twenty, Eadweard Muybridge, young Romantic, al-ready considered an eccentric. (Thousands of miles away, andtwenty-five years latcr , a man who had been his intimate friend wasto tell a jury, in support of a plea of insanity: "1 have known Muy-bridge to sit up all night reading, generally some classical work.")His destination was California, a simply fabulous land, like Sze-

chuan or the West of England, where gold, shipping, and thewhalefish had kept some men rich enough long enough to makethem hungry for culture. He set up shop as a genial bookseller in SanFrancisco, got to know the bohemian crowd, and prospered by out-fitting the local gentry with entire libraries.

I I I 1860 he reru rned to England, convalescent from a seriousstagecoach accident, for a visit that lasted nearly seven years; whilehe was there, he learned the cumbersome, delicate craft of the col-lodion wet-plate, and discovered his vocation as a photographer.When he returned to California, it was to work under thepseudonym "Hellos," affecting the broad-brimmed hat and velvetcape of continental poets and painters, and calling himself a "photo-graphic artist."During the next five years, he systematically photographed the

Far West, producing some 2,000 images in several series cataloguedby Bradley & Rulofson, a photographic gallery that distributed hiswork: these series included views of San Francisco, lighthouses ofthe Pacific Coast, Vancouver Island, Alaska (as Director of Photo-graphic Surveys for the United States government), Farallone Island,railroads, Geyser Springs, Wqodward's Gardens, Yosemite,Mariposa Grove. "Hclios' Flying Studio" offered not only albumsof contact prints made from very large plates, but also innumerableslides for the stereopticon that had already become indisp nsable inevery American household.In fact, it does not seem that Muybridge ever quite stopped rnak-


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ing conventional still photographs with the large view camera;material in the Kingston Library includes images made in places asdiverse as Alberta, Louisiana and Georgia, Maine, Chicago (at theWorld's Columbian Exhibition of 1893, where he operated hisZoopraxographical Hall among the sideshows on the Midway), andthe beaches at Atlantic City (New York holiday crowds romping inthe surf, dressed as i f for an Arctic blizzard); many were made.longafter he had completed and published his work in Philadelphia, inthe midst of repeated American and European tours with his zoo-praxiscope, lecturing on "The Science of Animal Locomotion in itsRelation to Design in Art."Sometime in lX70 01" 1_871,Muybridge married Flora Shallcross

Stone, a women much younger than himself, who had been (gaspsfrom the J u r y ) divorced. The work at Leland Stanford's Palo Altofarm began in the spring of 1872; the earliest instantaneous photo-graphs of horses, exposed with a high-speed shutter Muybridgcbuilt from a cigar box, have been lost" along with those made thefollowing year under improved conditions. The work was at firstonly sporadically pursued, with crude equipment; Muybridge pro-nounced himself dissatisfied with the results, which nonethelessattracted a good deal of attention as curiosities and augmented hisconsiderable international reputation. In 1873, he photographedthe progress of [he Modoc Indian War, making images of consider-able intimacy on both sides of the conflict, apparently acting as a freeagent, much as Roger Fenton had done in the Crimea. When he re-turned home, Flora Muybridg presented him with a baby boy thatshe had conceived in his absence by one Harry Larkyns, ne'er-do-well. On Octo her 17, 1874, Muybr id ge traveled by boat and wagonto Calistoga, where Larkyns was staying, and killed his wife's loverwith a single pistol shot. After a sensational trial, the jury found thehomicide justifiable. During four months of imprisonment, Muy-bridge's hair and beard had turned entirely white.He left immediately for a year-long photographic expedition in

Central America. While he was gone, Flora sued him for divorce ongrounds of extreme cruelty (in support of which she deposed onlythat Muybridge bad looked through their bedroom window, seenher sleeping, and then left; the case was dismissed, and we are left toimagine the ferocity of the man's stare). Shortly thereafter, she died.Returning to California, Muybridge issued an immense portfolio ofphotographs from Panama, Guatemala, an d Mexico, including a


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EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE fRAGMENTS OF A TESSERACT 73

.tudy of the cultivation of coffee.1877 brought h is last major work in still photography proper: an

immense 360-degree panorama of San Francisco, ill thirteen panelstaken from the roof of the Mark Hopkins house on Nob Hill. Hehad already resumed his studies of locomotion, at Palo Alto, and thistime it was in absolute earnest. He was forty-seven years old .

Had Muybridge left us none of his celebrated sequences, his place asan innovative master in the history of photographic art wouldnevertheless be assured. The huge body of work from his years ofgreatest creative expansion, the decade 1867-77, sustains from thevery outset, with almost voluptuous intensity, a markedly personalvision. Among early photographers of the American West, there isscarcely anyone (with the possible exception of Timothy O'Sullivan)to put alongside him: he is the Grand Progenitor of a West Coastschool of view camera photography that has included Edward Wes-ton, Imogen Cunningham). Wynn Bullock, and others in our owntime. He was, moreover, an indefatigable stereoscopist; his stereoimages, committing him by definition to the most thoroughgoingphotographic illusionism this side of full color, function as a curiouspalimpsest to the mature sequences, from which very many of the il-lusionist strategies available to photography have been rigorouslyevacuated.In his advertising cards for Pacific Rolling Mills, and for Bradl y

& Rulofson (neither ate isolated instances), he seems to anticipatemuch later developments elsewhere in the visual arts. 'Studies' oftrees and douds (the latter emphatically including the sun) predateby fifty and eighty years respectively the tree photographs of Atgetand Alfred Stieglitz' late work, the Equivalents.If any other photographer in the 19th century foreshadows the

20th as massively, that man must be Oscar Gustav Rejlander (1813-1875); and it is curious that Muybridge's method for makingthe serial photographs has a practical elaboration of a theoreticalscheme published by Rejlander. One wonders whether Muybridgeever met the man who began with The Two Ways of Life andended as Charles Darwin's illustrator, making The Artist's Dreamalong the way.But what interests me most, in aU this work of Muybridge' first

career, is something that seems to anticipate, almost subliminally,


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the sequences of Animal Locomotion ... a preoccupation that isrestless, never quire consistent] y present, seldom sharply focused: Lrefer to Muybridgc's apparent absorption in problems that have todo with what we call time.

Philosophical questions about the nature of time, originating in theascendancy of Newtonian mechanics, variously energized andvexed much of 19th-century thought. Einstein's relativisticmechanics eventually established that tim e is simply a function ofthe observer's frame of reference; 20th-century cinema discovered,quite early on, that temporality is precisely as plastic 'IS the filmicsubstance itself. lt is remarkable that cinema depends from aphilosophical fiction that we have from the paradoxes of Zello, andthat informs th e infinitesimal calculus of Newton: namely, that it ispossible to view the indivisible How of time as i f it were composed ofan infinite succession of discrete and perfectly static instants.But, during the long interval that concerns us, the questionbrought forth a profusion of views, each of which met its scientificapology and its specific implementation in art. The heathen opinion

had been that time was some sort of personifiable substance,Chronos, a corrosive universal solvent into which all things weredumped at the mom nt of their creation, and then slowly sank, suf-fering gradual attrition. From some such simile, speculations prolif-erated. Time WJS duration, or was rat of change, or it was the sumof al l conceivable rates. It was se en , alw ay s, as linear an d isotropic.Time, it was said, passed ..'. which looks, nowadays, like an exces-sively euphemistic way of saying that we pass.Art historians invented a variation, 'influence,' in which the fluid

metaphor becomes a hydraulic system for transmitting energy: Thefrog Virgil, jumping into the old pond, makes waves whose widen-ing rings eventually joggle the cork Tennyson. The flow is still seen asunidirectional. T.S. Eliot's crucial insight, that the temporal systemof a tradition permits, and even requires, movement of energy in alldirections, could nor have taken place within the metaphoric con-tinuum of 'classical' temporality.The underlying assumption was that time 'exists, I just as fictions

like ether and phlogiston were once supposed to exist, on a basis ofparity with the paper on which th swords ar printed. Whereas aconjectural summary of OLIr own view might read: 'Time' is our


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name for 811 irreducible condition of our perception of phenomena;therefore, staremenrs which would separate the notion of time fromsome object of direct perception, are meaningless.Much of the early history of still photography may be looked

upon as th e struggle of the art to purge itself of temporal ity. The nor-mative 'still photograph, the snapshot, purports to be an ideal, in-finitely thin, wholly static cross section through a four-dimensionalsolid, Or tesseract, of unimaginable inrricacy.W.H. Fox Talbot, in-ventor of photography and also a mathematician who was certainlyacquainted with the incremental model of time, writes of his longingto "capture ... creatu res of a single instant": the creatures in ques-tion arc landsca pc images projected on the groundglass of his earn-era obscura. He would escape time; and fix his instantaneous pic-tures, immutable and incorruptible, outside the influence of en-rropy, the destroyer. But it was not long before still photographersbegan toying with the temporal: the first known narrative sequence(illustrating the Lord's Prayer) dates to 1841, and that opened thefield to the likes' of Little Red Riding Hood (high seriousness in fourpanels, by Henry Peach Robinson, originator Q f new sins). Thateven the single image, in epitomizing an entire narrative, maythereby imply a temporality, was knowledge learned from the stillphotograph, of which the Surrealists were to make much.The work of Etienne-jules Marey, a scientist who switched ftomgraphic to photographic notations of animal movement under

Muybridge's direct tutelage, summarizes the point of disjunction be-tween the still photograph and cinema; his studies consist of serialexposures made on J single plate. The photograph could no longercontain the contradictory pressures to affirm time and to deny it. Itsplit sharply into an illusrionisric cinema of incessant motion and astatic photographic art that remained frozen solid for decades. Socomplete and immediate was the separation that by 1917 the photo-grapherAlvin Langdon Coburn (an ex-painter, who is rumored tohave collaborated on a Vorticist film, long since lost, with EzraPound) could speculate in print - and in ignorance - on the "inter-esting patterns;' that might be produced i f one were but to do whatMarey had in fact done, mountainously, thirty-odd years before.On first inspection, Muyhridge's early work seems to affirm the

antitemporality o f the still photography as he had inherited it. Hemay have meant to do so; an imperfection of his material ranCOunter to such intentions, The collodion plate was slow, exposures


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76 CIRCLES OF CONFUSiONJong, the image of anything moving blurred. Yet Muybridgc, in.sorne of his earliest landscape work, seems positively to seek, of allthings, waterfalls; long exposures of which produce images of astrange, ghostly substance that is in fact the tesseract of water: whatis to be seen is not water itself, but the virtual volume it occupies dur-ing the whole time-interval of the. exposure. It is certain that Muy-bridge was not the first photographer to make such pictures; mypoint is that he seems to have been the first to accept the 'error,' andthen systematically, to cherish it.In the photographs concerned with Point Bonita Lighthouse,

there is a kind of randomization, or reshuffling, of the sequence ofapproach to the lighthouse, seen from several different viewpoints,in sp ac e, which destroys the linearity of an implied molecule of nar-rative time, reducing the experience to a jagged sim ultaneity thatwas to be m ore fully explored in film montage fifty y ears late r.Generically allied to this series is the tactic adopted in an advertis-

in g photograph made fo r Bradley &Rulofson (and their center-ringattraction, Muybridgc himself). The resemblance to later collageand accumulation pieces long familiar to us is striking (the year i~1873), but it is, I think, superficial. Because the elements of theimage are themselves illusionistic fragments of photographs, ofvarying implied depth, the space is propelled backward and forwardon an inchmeal basis as we contemplate the contents of the frame;only the edges of the individual elements, ~ 1 I 1 d the graphic lines oftype which make us conscious of seeing marks Oil a surface, tend tocompress the image into the shallow inferential space proper toCubism. But the arrangement of photographs within the image is de-liberate, and what we do infer is the sequence in which the pieces ofthis still. life were laid down: in compounding a paradoxical il-lusionist space, Muybridge has also generated a 'shallow' inferentialtemporal iy. 'Muybridge continued this same investigation in at least one other

work: the title page for the Central Americanalburn Issued in 1875,the largest number of images from which remain breathlessly im-mobile. But in one subset (the photographs are in Kingston) of ahunting party in Panama, Muybridgetransgresses against one of thegreat commandments of view camera photography, permittingwhat was at that time the 1110stviolent smearing and blurring ofmoving figures (again, he acknowledged the images, and assumedresponsibility for them, by allowing them to be publicly distri-


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hured); the jungle background against which they are seen is ren-dered with canonical sharpness.Finally, in the great San Francisco panorama of 1877, he con-

denses an en ti re rota ti011 of the seeing eye aro und th e h OriZ0t1 (an ac-tion that must take place in time) into a simultaneity that is at oncecompletely plausible and perfectly impossible; it is as i f a work ofsculpture were to be seen turned inside out, by some prodigy oftopology.

Muybridge return ed, then, to Palo Alto and his sequences. The newattempts were immediately successful, and the work continued, forneatly two decades, in a delirium of inexorable logic and with littlemodification, synthesis following analysis; the results, at least inexcerpt, are known to everyone who associates anything at all withthe name of Eadweard Muybridge.Having once consciously fastened upon time as his grand subject,

Muybridge quickly emptied his images as nearly as h e couldof ev-erything else. His animals, athletes, and subverted painters' modelsare nameless and m ostly naked, performing their banalities, purgedof drama if not of occasional horseplay" before a uniform grid ofCartesian coordinates, a kind of universal 'frame of reference,' osten-sibly intended as an aid in reconciling the successive images withchronometry, that also destroys all sense of scale (the figures couldb e pag an constellations in the sky), and utterly obliterates the tactileparticularity that is O ne of the photograph's param ount 'traits,thereby annihilating any possible feeling 'of place .. About all that isleft, in each case, is an archetypal fragment of Living action, poten-tially subject to the Incessant reiteration that is one of the mostfamiliar and intolerable features of our dreams.Beyond that, there is a little that Muybridge, looking from close

up, could not have s-een: 1 am always aware, looking at the se-quences, that the bodies of Muybridge 's actors are somehowstran gely u nlike our own, as i f slightly obsolescent: The men seem tobe heavy-duty m odels; and all but the stoutest women are round-hipped, with small high breasts that rem ind me of Cranach 's Judg-ment of Paris. Their postures, gestures, gaits are not quite ourseither) and seem to mean som ethin g a little different. [ The children,birds, dogs, haven 't changed much. The horse is notable ch ie fly fo rappearing with what at first seems uncalled-for-frequency - until


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78 CIRCLES or CUNFUS/ONone recalls that there was once a t i me (geologically remote in feelingfrom own) when the horse represente-d very much more than therather mannered recreation we know today.And it was over Muybridge's photographs of the horse, of all

things, that a great storm of controversy broke in his own time.Painters. it seems, were absorbed in tendering, with perfect vert-similitude __ the horse! Emotions ran high, and so forth, and so 011. [have neither space nor inclination to pursue the argument here. PaulValery, in the midst of a discussion of Degas, gets to the heartof what was serious in rhc matter; r reproduce his discussion asdefinitive:

Muybridge's photographs laid hare all the mistakes thatsculptors and painters had made in their renderings of thevarious postures of the horse. They showed how inventivethe eye is, or rather how much the sight elaborates on thedata it gives us as the positive and impersonal result of ob-servation. Between the state of vision as mere patches o]color 'and as things or objects, a whole series of mysteriousoperations takes place; reducing to order as best it can theincoherence of raw perceptions, resolving contradictions,bringing to bear judgements formed since early infancy, im-posing continuity, connection, and the systems of changewhich we group under the labels of space. time, matter, andmovement. This WJS why the horse was imagined to movein the way the eye seemed to sec it; and i t might be that, i fthese old-style representations were examined withsufficient subtlety, the law of unconscious falsificationmight be discovered by which it seemed possible to picturethe positions of a bird in flight, or a horse galloping, as ifthey could be studied in leisure; but these interpolatedpauses are imaginary. Only probable positions could be as-signed to movement so rapid, and irrnight be worthwhile totry to define, by means of documentary comparison, thiskind of creative seeing by which the understanding filled the. . )gaps 11 1 sense percepnon.:


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The steps a man rakes, from the day of his birth of the day ofhis death, trace an inconceivable figure in time. The DivineIntelligence perceives that figure at once, as man's intelli-gence perceives a triangle. That figure, perhaps, has its de-termined function in the economy of the universe.

-Jorge Luis BorgesThe Mirror of the Enigmas

I. Ir s eems quite .appropria re rhar Ray Hi r dw h iste l I s ho uld be pu rsuin g h i s s tud ie s of k in esics atthe sa m e un iversity w here 11 in ery yea rs befo re , M uy bridge had stared the voca huln ry o f bodylanguage in to such vo lum inous existence , w hether or not he understood .myrhing o f its syn -tax.

2. Paul Valery, "Degas, Maner, an d Mortsut." Collected Works , vol, 12 , tr'11I~. D. Paul, NewYork, 1').60, p. 4!.

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frampton Muybridge