Google has celebrated the 182nd anniversary of the birth of Eadweard J Muybridge, the British photographer, by creating a “doodle” based on his ground-breaking 19th-century images of racehorses.

The animated graphic celebrates Muybridge’s “The Horse in Motion”, a film strip-style collection of shots created using 24 cameras which capture the running habits of racehorses owned by Leland Stanford, a Californian businessman and animal breeder. Stanford had wanted to know if galloping horses had all four legs off the ground, as previously portrayed by painters, and engaged Muybridge in an attempt to find out.

The photographs, taken in 1872 and regarded as one of the earliest forms of videography, demonstrated that all four legs often did leave the ground. However, they were not as artists had depicted them, with the legs stretched out fore and aft, but with the four legs tucked up under the horse.

Born in Kingston-upon-Thames on 9 April 1830, Muybridge later emigrated to the US and worked in the publishing sector before returning to England for a few years. While recuperating after a stagecoach accident that took place in the US, he became deeply interested in photography.

In the mid-1860s, he began to focus on landscape and architectural subjects, before producing the photographs of Yosemite National Park that established his reputation.

In 1874 Muybridge was prosecuted for and acquitted of the murder of his wife’s lover, a San Francisco Post drama critic. Muybridge’s lawyer entered a plea of insanity, although the jury actually found that the killing was a justifiable homicide under “unwritten law”.

He went on to use banks of cameras to photograph people and animals to study their movement and worked under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania. He eventually returned to the UK, where he died of a heart attack in May 1904 after publishing the last in a series of popular books based on his images and research. (via Eadweard J Muybridge celebrated in a Google doodle | Technology | guardian.co.uk)

venusgenus:

Phenomenal Woman: Ava Duvernay just made HISTORY! AFFRM founder, Ava DuVernay won Best Director at Sundance last night for Middle of Nowhere. She’s the first African-American woman to receive that honor. 

2headedsnake:

cupetinte.blogspot.com

Invented in 1832 by Joseph Plateau, the phenakistoscope was an early animation device that used the persistence of vision principle to create an illusion of motion.

Tombe de Georges Méliès au cimetière du Père-Lachaise à Paris (by Peter Cook UK)

theloudestvoice:

Georges Méliès (December 8, 1861 - January 21, 1938), far left,  at work in his studio, c. 1900

Happy birthday to one of the most beloved pioneers of early cinema. If you celebrate today by going to see Hugo, you’ll see the studio in the film is remarkably similar to the real thing!

Just might do that!

blerg:

Reproduction of “Animal Locomotion; Plate 197 (Couple Dancing)” by Eadweard Muybridge, on sale at 20x200. Read here about how gallerist James Danziger found, lost, and again found this print.

Would love to reproduce this someday as a wedding photo…

baileygenine:

My favorite Radiolab episode Time covers one of my favorite photographers, Eadweard Muybridge:

In 1872, former Governor of California Leland Stanford, had taken a position on a popularly-debated question of the day: whether all four of a horse’s hooves are off the ground at the same time during a gallop. Stanford sided with this assertion, called “unsupported transit”, and took it upon himself to prove it scientifically. Stanford sought out Muybridge and hired him to settle the question.

Muybridge used a series of large cameras that used glass plates placed in a line, each one being triggered by a thread as the horse passed. Later a clockwork device was used. The images were copied in the form of silhouettes onto a disc and viewed in a machine called a Zoöpractiscope. This, in fact became an intermediate stage towards motion pictures or cinematography.

In 1877, Muybridge settled Stanford’s question with a single photographic negative showing Stanford’s racehorse Occident airborne in the midst of a gallop. By 1878, spurred on by Stanford to expand the experiment, Muybridge had successfully photographed a horse in fast motion.

This series of photos taken in Palo Alto, California, is called Sallie Gardner at a Gallop or The Horse in Motion, and shows that the hooves do all leave the ground — although not with the legs fully extended forward and back, as contemporary illustrators tended to imagine, but rather at the moment when all the hooves are tucked under the horse as it switches from “pushing” with the back legs to “pulling” with the front legs. This series of photos stands as one of the earliest forms of videography.

Cinecittà is a mysteriously complex analog to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” a poem in which a traveler narrates the story of finding in the desert the fragments of an oversized statue of an ancient tyrant. On the pedestal of the fallen sculpture, the words “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings/Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!,” comments on the futility of military aggression. Cinecittà as well suggests the absurdity of Mussolini’s grandiosity but also resonates with the other theme of Shelley’s poem, that the despair of dictators is the miraculous hope of art; flowers may thrive where conquest has failed. Indeed, adding insult to injury, immediately after the fascist collapse, Cinecittà housed hundreds of displaced persons, and thus became a shelter for the victims of fascist aggrandizement. Many of the temporary residents were called on as extras in the films of the postwar period. In due course, Cinecittà, specifically its monumental Studio Five, became the turf of Federico Fellini, surfer of dreams, leaving in the dust all traces of Italy’s darkest years, the Ventennio, 1922 to 1943.[…]

Stray visitors to this set are rare, but not the sensation of larger forces at work. A German director who films international commercials at Cinecittà, whose name Carole Andre-Smith is hesitant to disclose, claims to feel the presence of ghosts when he works there. A similarly unnamed, but well known I am assured, Italian director likes to walk around Cinecittà for the “vibes,” and Dario Argento has said that he considers “Cinecittà a ‘mythic zone,’ the core of my film-loving dreams.” But the majority of responses to this studio suggest a sense of comfort rather than the occult, a feeling conducive to creativity. The most striking of these endorsements comes from Marcello Mastroianni, who has been quoted as saying that “Cinecittà is a symbolic and beautiful fortress: outside is Hell, while inside its walls fairy tales are told, sometimes sour, sometimes sweet, sometimes funny.” More moderately, Jean Renoir has said, “I am happy to work in Cinecittà and what I appreciate most of this magnificent studio is the technical and labor staff. For three months I felt I was at home…” Gina Lollobrigida too has spoken of feeling “at home,” and Liliana Cavani has praised Cinecittà as a place where “it’s possible to achieve completeness spurred by the enthusiasm and artisan spirit of the people who work in its structure.”

(via Cineaste Magazine - Articles - The Cinecittà Pentimento Effect: A Firsthand Account)

landlessness:

Alice Guy-Blaché was the first female director in the motion picture industry.