Sarah Gordon | Prestige, Professionalism, and the Paradox of Eadweard Muybridge's Animal Locomotion Nudes | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 130.1

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Sarah Gordon | Prestige, Professionalism, and the Paradox of Eadweard Muybridge's Animal Locomotion Nudes | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 130.1 | The History Cooperative

Prestige, Professionalism, and the Paradox of Eadweard Muybridge's Animal Locomotion Nudes

In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge's serial photographs of trotting and galloping horses stunned artists, scientists, and critics in the United States and Europe (fig. 1). Muybridge's camera revealed equine bodies frozen mid-leap in positions never before detected by the human eye or captured on film. When viewed in quick succession, the serial photographs reanimated motion and the subjects sprang to life. Nine years later, the culmination of Muybridge's motion studies was published in Philadelphia under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania. Animal Locomotion: An Electro-photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements, 1872–1885, comprised 781 nineteen-by-twenty-four-inch collotype plates, each of which contained between twelve and thirty-six frames, resulting in a total of approximately twenty thousand images.¹ Of the 781 plates, 514 depicted adult men and women in motion; 5 focused on the movement of an adult male hand; 27 captured abnormal male and female movement; 16 represented children; and 219 depicted animals, including horses, birds, and various other wild and domestic animals. Notably, approximately 340 of the series featured fully nude men and women performing daily activities before a gridded backdrop. Populating the first four volumes and part of volume eight of the eleven-volume publication, the male nudes ran, jumped, rowed, and swung bats (fig. 2) while the females swept, served tea, made beds, and danced, among other activities (fig. 3).

Fig. 1. The Horse in Motion, photograph by Eadweard Muybridge. "Sallie Gardner," owned by Leland Stanford; running at a 1:40 gait over the Palo Alto track, 19th June 1878. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-45683].

Fig. 2. Man batting. Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: An Electro-photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements, 1872–1885 (Philadelphia, 1887), plate 277. Library Company of Philadelphia.

Fig. 3. Woman sweeping. Muybridge, Animal Locomotion, plate 58. Library Company of Philadelphia.

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