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Baptiste Frenet’s unusual collodion transfer process
seems to have been particularly effective in capturing
motion, enabling him to portray natural behaviors such
as a child’s yawn in the mid 1850s. Working just a
few years later, Charles Nègre photographed workers
and inmates at the Imperial Asylum at Vincennes. His
precocious photographs of people and events on the
streets of Paris foreshadow reportage images of the
1920s. Louis-Jean Delton’s photographs of clowns
in the 1860s convey the spontaneity of a circus act,
while Adrien Tournachon’s contemporaneous tableaux
of street performers, and particularly of the Mime
Debureau in the role of Pierrot, depict the nuances of
gesture and facial expression.
Scotsmen John Adamson and the duo of David Octa-
vius Hill and Robert Adamson anticipated instantaneous
genre photography in their well-posed pictures of sol-
diers and fi shwives made in the early 1840s. Using a
collodion on glass negative process, compatriot Charles
Piazzi Smyth made a remarkably personal series of pho-
tographs of Russian soldiers in the squares of Novgorod
around 1857. Geoffrey Bevington managed to produce
convincing photographic illustrations of workers en-
gaged in their occupations in the 1860s. However, it was
in street photography that British photographers were
best known. A friendly transatlantic rivalry emerged
between George Washington Wilson and the American
Edward Anthony. Unknowingly at fi rst, the two echoed
each other’s work in street scenes made in their respec-
tive cities of Edinburgh and New York City. The market
for instantaneous stereo cards blossomed in the 1850s
and 60s. In England, Valentine Blanchard and William
England developed large catalogues of instantaneous
stereo views. Their efforts were echoed modestly by
Giorgio Sommer in Naples and Carleton Watkins in San
Francisco, while Ernest Lamy, Gustave Laverdet, and
Auguste-Adolphe Bertsch recorded bustling foot traffi c
on the streets of Paris.
Instantaneity was particularly important in the fi eld of
animal and zoological photography. The unpredictability
of animal subjects made apparently simple photographs
of animals diffi cult to execute: pictures of birds such as
those made in nature by John Dilwynn Llewelyn and
those made at the London Zoo by Count de Montizon in
the 1850s were largely confi ned to species with stalking
behaviors such as herons, cranes and egrets. Numerous
photographers specialized in animal subjects, notably
Louis-Jean Delton, Léon Crémière, and Frank Haes.
However, technological limitations affected what could
be photographed naturally, so that in some cases animals
were actually stuffed and arranged in dynamic poses.
Louis-Pierre-Théophile Dubois de Nehaut’s unparal-
leled photographs of the elephant Betsy taken in 1854
at the Brussels Zoo are one notable exception.
By the 1870s, interest in producing truly instanta-neous photographs of animals in motion resulted in
landmark experiments in the United States and Europe
to photograph a horse while galloping. These proved
decisive in the history of instantaneous photography. In
France, the physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey initially
used non-photographic means to attempt to determine
the gait of a running horse. This met with only modest
success; the results were diffi cult to verify because the
human eye cannot see fast enough to judge the posi-
tion of all four legs of a running horse. In California,
expatriate English photographer Eadweard Muybridge
was hired by former Governor Leland Stanford to
analyze the gaits of horses at his ranch in Palo Alto
California in 1872. The purpose of Muybridge’s work
was to determine whether a horse ever has all its hooves
simultaneously off the ground at some point in its stride.
Although he reported modest success using photography
to settle the question in 1873, the pictures he produced
then were never published and are not preserved.
Muybridge’s project was interrupted by unfortunate
developments in his personal life, but resumed with
Stanford’s fi nancial backing in 1877. At that time, using
a specially designed track and a battery of cameras with
automatic shutters, Muybridge produced sequential in-
stantaneous photographs of unprecedented speed. When
published, they inspired Marey to dedicate himself to
his own equine experiments using photography. Using
Muybridge’s accomplishments as a point of departure,
Marey developed numerous innovative methods for
making a sequence of instantaneous photographs on a
single photographic plate, and extended his experiments
to other animals, notably humans and birds. Muybridge,
too, photographed a range of animals including dogs,
goats, deer, and oxen.
The advent of gelatin dry plate photography in 1878
greatly facilitated the production of instantaneous pho-
tographs. Ottomar Anschütz in Prussia, mindful of the
photographs of his contemporaries, produced stunningly
detailed individual instantaneous pictures in the 1880s,
some of which he assembled into grid-like sequences
refl ecting Muybridge’s sequential method. His work,
together with that of others, such as the Hungarian
Bertalan Székely and the Frenchman Albert Londe,
transformed the instantaneous photography movement,
bringing metric precision and scientifi c protocol to bear
on photographic picture making. This new generation of
photographers created a distinct but loosely organized
movement known as chronophotography.
Instantaneous photography effectively ended with
the rise of chronophotography, but its legacy was long
lasting. The desire to make instantaneous photographs
greatly infl uenced composition and subject matter in
photography’s fi rst four decades. Perhaps more impor-
tantly, the notion that photography could see what the
human eye could not closely paralleled the medium’sINSTANTANEOUS PHOTOGRAPHY
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