I was first put onto the work of Eadweard Muybridge (a photographer born in 1830) by my tutor when I first mentioned that I wanted to research movement within photography. His work is known for his sequential ‘motion images’, which ties in perfectly with my topic and luckily there was a current exhibition of his being displayed at Tate Britain, so I popped along and had a look for myself.
The first thing you see as you enter are the poetically beautiful photographs of California, which document the American landscape. The waterfalls, rocks and railroads one photograph which held my particular attention within these was Valley of the Yosemite 1872. The quality was breathtakingly perfect and the contrast with the chiaroscuro was bold and sharp adding a striking edge to the photos. Muybridge uses long exposures to that makes the waterfalls flow serenely almost out of the photo, an effect that now is not common but for his time it was remarkably modern and cutting edge. I believe that these experemnts with exposure may have been what lead him to eventually experiment with creating movement within stills.
The next rooms displayed information about Muybridge himself, the man behind the lense, and also his experimental use of photo manipulation, the sort of things that we can now produce with Photoshop Muybridge had to figure out how to produce by hand. He combined separate negatives together to create these amazing new images. something that was quite apparent with Muybridges work is that it still looks as fresh and modern today as it would have done in the 1800’s when they would have been produced. I believe this is because Muybridge had an unequivocal understanding of how to make a composition work, a skill that is mimiced with contemporary photographers on a daily basis.
