Description
Animal Locomotion. An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements 1872-1885. Philadelphia, 1887. Large oblong folio, 95 collotypes including photographs of Men, Women, Children, and Animals each on a two-toned leaf, with letterpress title, plate number, copyright, and date in the margin, rebound in modern red morocco-backed cloth, vellum corners, a little light spotting or very slight dust-soiling to most plates, stamp of Museum of Edinburgh (Science and Art) to title page and plate versos, Royal Scottish Museum Cancelled stamp to title
Footnote
Note: Edweard Muybridge (1830-1904), a brilliant and eccentric photographer, gained worldwide fame photographing animal and human movement imperceptible to the human eye.
In 1872 former California Governor Leland Stanford asked Muybridge to determine through photography whether all four hooves of a galloping horse left the ground at the same time. By setting up multiple cameras to capture motion in stop-motion photographs, Eadweard Muybridge captured animals' movement in a way that had never been done before.
In the 1880s the University of Pennsylvania sponsored Muybridge's research using banks of cameras to photograph people in a studio, and animals from the Philadelphia Zoo to study their movement. The human models, either entirely nude or very lightly clothed, were photographed against a measured grid background in a variety of action sequences, including walking up or down stairs, hammering on an anvil, carrying buckets of water, or throwing water over one another, eventually producing thousands of images of animals and humans in motion, capturing what the human eye could not distinguish as separate movements.
Muybridge thought of himself primarily as an artist but also saw the scientific and commercial aspects of his inventions. He spent much of his later years giving public lectures and demonstrations of his photography and early motion picture sequences, inventing the "zoopraxiscope", a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the flexible perforated film strip used in cinematography. This device was later regarded as an early movie projector, and the process as an intermediate stage toward motion pictures or cinematography.
In 1887 The University of Pennsylvania published 781 plates under the title Animal Locomotion in a series of volumes. The album offered for sale, which contains 95 of these seminal photographs, was formerly in the collection of the Royal Scottish Museum and the Museum of Edinburgh. Muybridge's influence was widely recognised by scientists and artists, Thomas Eakins, William Dickson, Thomas Edison, Marcel Duchamp, Harold Edgerton and Francis Bacon, amongst others, all acknowledging their debt to Muybridge's pioneering work.