could regard this image as simple news reportage, it also functions to
impress on people the high price of the Civil War. Corpses litter the
battlefield as far as the eye can see. O’Sullivan presented a scene
stretching far to the horizon. As the photograph modulates from the
precise clarity of the bodies of Union soldiers in the foreground,
boots stolen and pockets picked, to the almost indistinguishable
corpses in the distance, the suggestion of innumerable other dead
soldiers is unavoidable. This “harvest” is far more sobering and de-
pressing than that in Winslow Homer’s Civil War painting,Ve t e r a n
in a New Field(FIG. 30-37). Though it would be many years before
photolithography could reproduce photographs like this in news-
papers, photographers exhibited them publicly. They made an im-
pression that newsprint engravings never could.
EADWEARD MUYBRIDGEThe Realist photographer and
scientist Eadweard Muybridge(1830–1904) came to the United
States from England in the 1850s and settled in San Francisco, where
he established a prominent international reputation for his pho-
tographs of the western United States. In 1872 the governor of Cali-
fornia, Leland Stanford (1824–1893), sought Muybridge’s assistance
in settling a bet about whether, at any point in a stride, all four feet of
a horse galloping at top speed were off the ground. Through his se-
quential photography, as seen in Horse Galloping (FIG. 30-54),
Muybridge proved they were. This experience was the beginning of
Muybridge’s photographic studies of the successive stages in human
and animal motion—details too quick for the human eye to capture.
These investigations culminated in 1885 at the University of Penn-
sylvania with a series of multiple-camera motion studies that re-
corded separate photographs of progressive moments in a single ac-
tion. Muybridge’s discoveries received extensive publicity through
the book Animal Locomotion(1887), and his motion photographs
earned him a place in the history of science as well as art. These se-
quential motion studies, along with those of Eakins and Marey, in-
fluenced many other artists, including their contemporary, the
painter and sculptor Edgar Degas (FIG. 31-10), and 20th-century
artists such as Marcel Duchamp (FIG. 35-1).
Muybridge presented his work to scientists and general audi-
ences with a device called the zoopraxiscope,which he invented to
project his sequences of images (mounted on special glass plates)
onto a screen. The result was so lifelike that one viewer said it “threw
upon the screen apparently the living, moving animals. Nothing was
wanting but the clatter of hoofs upon the turf.”^16 The illusion of mo-
tion here was the result of an aspect of human eyesight called “per-
sistence of vision.” Stated simply, it means that the brain retains
whatever the eye sees for a fraction of a second after the eye stops
seeing it. Thus, viewers saw a rapid succession of different images
merging one into the next, producing the illusion of continuous
change. This illusion lies at the heart of the motion-picture industry
that debuted in the 20th century, and thus was born cinema as a new
art form.818 Chapter 30 EUROPE AND AMERICA, 1800 TO 187030-54Eadweard Muybridge,Horse Galloping,1878.
Calotype print, 9 12 . George Eastman House,
Rochester.
Muybridge specialized in photographic studies of the
successive stages in human and animal motion—details
too quick for the human eye to capture. Modern cinema
owes a great deal to his work.
1 in.