701
Waldo Emerson built up a body of work so intense and
remarkable that he is considered to be the father of a
revival in artistic photography. The son of a rich Cuban
planter, he came to England to study medicine, a fi eld in
which he excelled. However, after purchasing a camera
in 1880, he decided to devote his life to photography.
His professional career only spanned fi fteen years,
for after 1895 he stopped working but continued to
encourage artists such as Alfred Stieglitz and, later on,
Gyula Halàsz Brassaï. Emerson upheld that photography
should be essentially naturalistic. He expounded this
theory scientifi cally in an essay entitled Naturalistic
Photography for Students of the Art (1889), in which he
argued that photography was superior to painting as a
means of expression through plasticity, and as a means
for transporting the naturalistic vision. In 1890, after a
period of crisis, he renounced these theories.
Emerson had always conceived his photographs for
publication, with the text playing a subordinate but
complementary role to the pictures. Like Jean-François
Millet, whom he greatly admired, he was interested in
the daily life of pleasants. He portrayed their movements
and daily rituals, imbuing them with a feeling of the
monumental and of timeless gravity. Over a period of
then years, Emerson produced no less than twelve albums
of photographs of the lives of peasants in East Anglia.
The photographic images in the 1880s of Hameter,
Muybridge, Jackson, Watkins, Vroman, Thomson, Von
Stillfried all have a pictorial and consciously, artistic
accent.
An entirely new direction was charted by Eadweard
Muybridge (1830–1904), the father of motion photog-
raphy. He mixed two different technologies, devising
a set of cameras capable of photographing action at
successive points. After some trial efforts, Muybridge
managed in 1877 to get a set of pictures of a trotting
horse, which forever changed artistic depictions of the
horse in motion. The photographs of Muybridge convey
a peculiarly modern sense of dynamics refl ecting the
new tempo of life in the industrial age. However, because
the gap between scientifi c fact and visual perception on
the other was so big, the Futurists would realize their
far-reaching aesthetic implications only later.
Edward James Muggeridge was born in Kingston on
Thames, and it is said that because this area is associ-
ated with the coronation of Saxon kings, he took on a
name closely resembling (as he saw it) the Anglo Saxon
equivalent. In his early twenties he moved to America,
and became famous for his landscape photographs of the
American West. As he used the collodion process, like
other traveling photographers, he needed to take with
him all the sensitizing and processing equipment, as all
three processes of sensitization, exposure and processing
needed to be done while the plate was still wet.
During the late sixties and early seventies he made
some two thousand pictures, exposing negatives of a
size of 20 × 24 inch. Though he is not given the ac-
claim he deserves, many his landscape studies rank
with the best.
However, Muybridge’s main claim to fame was his
exhaustive study of movement. Just at same time the
French physiologist Etienne Marey was studying ani-
mal movement, and his studies began to suggest that a
horse’s movements were very different from what one
had imagined. One of the people who became aware of
this research was Leland Stanford, a former governor
of California, who owned a number of racehorses.
Stanford was determined to fi nd the truth about this. It
is said that he bet with a friend that when a horse gal-
lops, at a particular point all four feet are off the ground
simultaneously. To prove his case he hired Muybridge
to investigate whether the claim was true.
Muybridge’s studies are very comprehensive, and
include some detailed studies of men and women walk-
ing, running, jumping, and so on.
In 1878 an article in Scientifi c American published
some of Muybridge’s sequences, and suggested that
readers might like to cut the pictures out and place them
in a “zoetrope” so that the illusion of movement might be
re-created. Intrigued by this, Muybridge experimented
further, and later he invented the zoopraxiscope, an
instrument that paved the way for cine photography.
This invention was greeted with enormous enthusiasm
both in America, whilst in England a demonstration at
the Royal Institution in 1882 attracted people like the
Prince of Wales, the Prime Minister (Gladstone), Ten-
nyson, amongst others.
In 1884 the University of Pennsylvania commis-
sioned Muybridge to make a further study of animal and
human locomotion. The report, “Animal Locomotion”
was published three years later and still ranks as the
most detailed study in this area. It contains more than
twenty thousand images.
Eadweard Muybridge began a new series of lecture
tours in the United States, Britain, France, Germany,
Switzerland and Italy following publication of his Ani-
mal Locomotion in 1887.
At that time photographers were also able to look
back at the work of their predecessors. Thomas Annan’s
son James Craig Annan made a major contribution
to our knowledge of early English photography, and
was instrumental in the publication of a great deal of
photographic material. He reprinted the work of Hill &
Adamson, whose studio and negatives had been taken
over by his father in 1899. The subjective impression and
the expression of inner experience had become major
elements of the light drawing.
There was a highly stylized quality in the work ofHISTORY: 7. 1880s