David Hockney once complained that photography was a paltry art because its angle on the world is restricted to what the camera sees at the moment of exposure: Unlike painting, a photograph can make no space for time. Tate Britain’s massive and magnificent forthcoming exhibition of Eadweard Muybridge’s work proves Hockney wrong. Combining artistic vision with scientific analysis, Muybridge showed how an image that paralyses motion can catch the fluency of phenomena. He was one of the great photographic thinkers, whose mind reached ahead from still photography towards the inevitable invention of the cinema, which
he anticipated by constructing a gadget
called a zoopraxiscope that could animate sequences of images to display mules kicking or nymphs dancing.
Despite his scientific skills, he enjoyed the esoteric mystery of his new medium. Photography writes with light, and in homage to the Greek sun god Muybridge called himself Helios; the emblem on the business card attached wings to his camera and made it radiate beams. But the would-be deity was also a shrewd faker, a sly self-inventor — he was born, a little too drably for his own taste, as Edward Muggeridge in Kingston upon Thames, near London — and a busy self-promoter. In between photographic expeditions in the Californian wilderness, Panama and Guatemala, lecture tours of Europe, and experimental sessions to study the movement of trotting ponies, galloping horses and skittish deer, he even managed to commit a murder.
Muybridge’s great achievement was conceptual: He made time visible in space. His studies of locomotion atomize duration into instants. He demonstrates, for instance, what water looks like, second by second, as it is hurled from a bucket by a bizarrely naked female model. With a battery of cameras tripped by electrical switches he captures minute metamorphoses too quick for the blinking human eye. What we see as a sloppy, slurping mess is a rainbow of gravity-defying droplets, then a looped ribbon that twists around itself, next a leaping fish or a slippery mermaid. He seems to have trapped a spirit, compelling wet ectoplasm to solidify in the air — and of course, like many of his Victorian contemporaries, he could do that as well: When photographing the house of a Californian patron, he included the double-exposed ghost of the owner, patrolling the premises to keep an eye on his late wife.
Time is a stream, flowing around us and through us, incising lines on faces as it abrades rocks. Almost magically, Muybridge devised ways of enabling us to see that stealthy entropy at work in nature. Time is written into the sedimentary layers of the cliffs he photographed, or computed in the rings of the inconceivably ancient and enormous Californian sequoias. The grandiose vistas he photographed in Yosemite are not only sublime evidence of God’s grandeur or America’s glory, like the same scenes when looked at through the cameras of Carleton Watkins and Ansel Adams. Muybridge emphasizes the destructive and creative power of water, which over millennia carves tracks through mountains. A lake can pretend to be a placid camera, duplicating and inverting the mountains of Yosemite, but in other moods water is aggressive, able to sculpt stone. Muybridge’s long exposures make waterfalls or surging creeks look like sharpened wedges or blunt-ended mallets, weapons that enforce geological flux.
He followed the advance of the railways that abbreviated time and conquered space as they unified the US, but he knew that these technological changes had been anticipated, with epochal gradualness, by nature. A glacier in Yosemite is as implacably regular as the steel tracks being laid by the Union Pacific engineers.
Muybridge’s work can be, as it is here, spectacularly terrifying. On other occasions — as when he gets a woman costumed as a Greek nymph to walk endlessly up and down stairs holding a teacup so that he can study the locomotive processes involved — he is either whimsical or frankly weird. His odd self-portraits suggest something of his strangeness. In one he pretends to be harmlessly dozing in an art gallery; in another he appears, abstractly reshaped into a black lump, in a reflecting globe set up in an amusement park. He performed for his own locomotion studies, dressed only in underpants despite his sagacious white beard: Imagine Moses exercising at the gym.
Most unsettling of all is a portrait by a colleague in which Muybridge hunches, scowling with paranoia, at the base of a patriarchal sequoia, apparently ready to wriggle into a cavity between its roots. Here the man who wielded the axe resembles a potential axe murderer, and in 1874 he did indeed gun down his wife’s lover. Placed on trial for murder, he first pleaded insanity, then allowed his lawyer to admit his guilt while entreating the jury “to send him forth free to resume that profession, which is now his only love.” Art, luckily, mattered more than the piddling strictures of the law, and Muybridge was acquitted. Everyone who goes to the Tate exhibition will be grateful for the miscarriage of justice.
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