Skeleton of Horse

Who was Eadweard Muybridge? "Father of motion pictures?" He was one of them, sure. Self-promoting inventor of the Zoopraxiscope, which was hardly an improvement upon prior combinations of the magic lantern and phenakistiscope--sure, he was that, too. English expatriate photographically exploring the American frontier, indeed. Guy who changed his name several times as part of his attempts to create a mystique about himself, which he mostly pulled off because of his magnificent beard--yes. Muybridge, however, was also a killer. And not only because he gunned down Harry Larkyns, his wife's lover and possibly their son's father, for which Muybridge was tried and declared not guilty on the grounds of justifiable homicide--the Wild West jury essentially legalizing murderous jealousy--but also in a figurative sense.

Before that fatal incident in 1874 Muybridge had mostly been a landscape photographer, including of Yosemite and creating a panorama view of San Francisco. It was this that brought him to the attention of robber baron Leland Stanford and his horses. It was the beginning of a career in which Muybridge would obsessively shoot (photographically, that is) just about every living thing he came across. It was a slaughter of humanity and the animal kingdom brought before his batteries of firing cameras. Like a taxidermist, he would, then, arrange these corpses into books and, perhaps, use them as models for the painted discs rotating to create animations for his Zoopraxiscope lectures. He took lives and made ghosts that haunt us to this day.

I've already chronicled his chronophotography, or rapidly-photographed serial images (i.e. Essentially the same thing as motion pictures), in my review of "Sallie Gardner at a Gallop" (1878) and shan't repeat myself here, but I wanted to write about this particular series of stills, of a horse skeleton, because it's so different from the rest of his immense oeuvre. Here, we have photographs of an already dead animal, its skeleton, which was posed in alternating positions that could subsequently create the illusion of life, of movement, of the skeleton galloping and jumping over a hurdle continuously, immortal. It may be the truest sense of the word "movie" that Muybridge ever made.

Indeed, in addition to the series being published in his 1881 book of photographs "Attitudes of Animals in Motion," a 26 March 1881 San Francisco Bulletin article headlined "Moving Figures," describes this specific series synthesized by the projection of his Zoopraxiscope. This seems to have been a rare case, as the distortion of the Zoopraxiscope generally resulted in Muybridge having elongated drawn animations made for it instead of using photographs. I've only heard of one such photographic Zoopraxiscope disc being since found, and it sounds like it was for this series.

Unlike the rest of his chronophotography, which already contained motion when the cameras snapped, these posed photographs could produce a stop-motion animation effect. Even in book form, a viewer would get the impression of movement. More striking movement even than from the pictures taken from life, because photography of the inanimate allowed for longer exposure periods for the wet-collodion process of the day to fully develop, as opposed to the silhouette results incurred in Muybridge's earliest experiments at Palo Alto. These are images that not only benefit from a pioneer in the field of chronophotography, but also from the experienced eye of a landscape photographer.

Muybridge wasn't the first to create the illusion of motion from the synthesis of individually-posed photographs, but he may've been the best at it. The earliest experiments in photographic motion were created this way. Inventor Jules Dubosq accomplished this c.1852 with a series of images that when spun on a disc gave the impression of a working steam engine, and it was even a stereoscopic experiment producing the illusion of 3D. Scientist Jan Evangelista Purkyne accomplished something similar, minus the 3D but with perhaps added clarity, with a self-portrait in 1865, and he's rumored to have accomplished a more amazing feat with images of a beating heart, although I've seen no photographic evidence of that. The same year, Nadar created a revolving portrait of himself. And, in 1870, Henry Heyl exhibited his Phasmatrope (another combination magic lantern and phenakistiscope contraption), which among other things, featured a couple waltzing. Antoine Claudet, Charles Wheatstone and others accomplished similar, but doubled, series for stereoscope peephole viewers.

Aside from the quality of the photography, then, Muybridge's series isn't technically novel. What makes it remarkable is its subject. If only this once, he grasped what those aforementioned seem not to have realized--that photography isn't about creating life. It's about conjuring ghosts; it's death. I've commented on this before, but it bears repeating. Motion pictures are the process of capturing life, by making it dead as still images, and reanimating it. Muybridge excised the first part here, admitting the art's fundamental deathly purpose. André Bazin theorized as much in his essay on "The Ontology of the Photographic Image." Some of the most intelligent innovators in the history of the invention of movies seem to have understood this, it's such a prevalent theme. The inventor of the magic lantern, or as it was otherwise known, "the lantern of fear," Christiaan Huygens sketched a moving slide of a skeleton removing its skull for it. The macabre became the entire show of Robertson's Fantasmagoria. The most famous 19th-century slide for Beale's Choreutoscope improvement on Huygens's invention are six successive drawings of a dancing skeleton. Lumière repeated the same thing by filming a marionette for "The Merry Skeleton" (1898). It's something Edison's crass business couldn't do artfully, as evidenced by "Electrocuting an Elephant" (1903). Walt Disney revived the trick for its animation early on in "The Skeleton Dance" (1929). Thus, Muybridge, too, and he did it by reworking the image he's become most celebrated for, the galloping horse.

This is probably the very first stop-motion animation. Muybridge photographed different poses of a horse skeleton that was imported from New York, early in 1881. It is the first sequence Muybridge shot in a detailed photographic quality.

Eadweard Muybridge by now had two moving pictures to his credit: "Sallie Gardner at a Gallop" and "Athlete Swinging a Pick." In both of those there were living creatures in motion. In "Skeleton of Horse" we know a horse's skeleton didn't start moving unless there was something supernatural at play. Barring ghosts, Muybridge had to manipulate the skeleton and take a series of photos to get the illusion that the skeleton was in motion.