Carl Weese, America’s Forgotten Drive-In Theaters
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)
Throughout the mid to late 1970s and upwards, Hiroshi Sugimoto packed up a folding 4x5 camera & tripod, surreptitiously entered matinees (and, one can only presume, evening film events) and documented the interior of movie theatres across the United States. He would open the shutter just before the ‘first light’ hit the screen and close it after the credits finished rolling and before the house lights came on. Using this method he was able to invert the subject/object relationship of the movie theatre and use the film itself to illuminate the proscenium and interior. This content, largely unaddressed critically, is what lends the images their incredible power — along wtih the natural fascination of being made privy to the photography’s divine birthright — allowing us to see the normally invisible, to experience a finite collapse of time.
“it’s gonna be warped and peculiar and imperfect and odd, and it’s not gonna be reproduction, it’s storytelling.”
Penelope Stamp
The Brothers Bloom
Rian Johnson
Cinemascapes: Google Street View Edition
Strikingly cinematic landscapes captured by Google Street View cameras, collected by photographer Aaron Hobson
(via guy)
The Lansdowne Theatre 2011. (by porc3laind0ll)
When Twin Peaks’ in-house photographer had quit and no further promotional shots were needed since the show was cancelled, Richard Beymer (Benjamin Horne) took his Olympus camera to the set and was given David Lynch’s thumbs up to document the last days of filming the show.
If you want a signed and numbered photo, head over to the TP20 blog for instructions on how to order.
Noel Kerns specializes in ghost towns, decommissioned military installations, and industrial abandonments at night. This? A faux diner and Joshua tree at the Four Aces movie set, in the desert near Lake Los Angeles, California.
Harry Potter by Frank Ockenfels
Ron and Hermione by Frank Ockenfels
