Time Stands Still: Muybridge and The Instantaneous Photography Movement

New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Softbound. VG+. Illustrated wraps. xii, [3], 310 pp., profusely illustrated. Eadweard Muybridge, famous for the photographs of horses and other animals in motion that he made in the 1870s and '80s, is a familiar figure to students of art history, photography, and cinema. By devising a method for photographing episodes of behavior using a series of cameras, he became the first photographer to successfully capture rapid action for analysis and study. Muybridge's pictures revolutionized expectations of what photography could reveal about the natural world, and were essential to the invention of the motion picture. This book is the catalogue for a major exhibition celebrating Muybridge's work, which opened in spring 2003 at the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University. The first large-scale organized treatment of the instantaneous photography movement, the exhibit--and the catalogue--combine an examination of Muybridge's career with a survey of early attempts to photograph moving subjects. The catalogue, written by guest curator Phillip Prodger, also features an essay by Tom Gunning, an acknowledged expert on early film from the University of Chicago, which discusses cinema's earliest experiments. The photographs and objects featured in the catalogue are drawn largely from the collection of the Cantor Center and are supplemented with a selection of rare stop-action photographs from other private and public collections, including seldom-seen examples from Central and Eastern Europe. Among those represented are Le Gray, Llewelyn, Talbot, Rejlander, Marey, Eakins, Londe, Anschütz, and many more.