Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement

Eadweard Muybridge, one of the great pioneer-innovators of the 19th century, is a familiar figure to students of art history, photography, and cinema. Muybridge is best known for the photographs of horses and other animals in motion, which he made in the 1870s and 80s. The first person to use photography to freeze rapid action for analysis and study, he devised a method for photographing episodes of behavior using a series of cameras, producing some of the most famous sequential photographs ever made. These pictures, the first successful photographs of rapidly moving subjects, revolutionized expectations of what photography could reveal about the natural world.
Time Stands Still is the catalogue to accompany a major exhibition celebrating the work of Eadweard Muybridge, one of the most influential photographers of the 19th century. The exhibition, opening Spring 2003 and touring through 2004, will combine an examination of the artists' career in motion photograph with a survey of early attempts to photograph moving subjects. The catalogue is primarily written by guest curator Phillip Prodger, but includes an additional essay on the earliest experiments in cinema by Tom Gunning, an expert on early film at the University of Chicago. The exhibition will display Muybridge's zoopraxiscope and other equipment, drawings, ephemera, and photographs made from the invention of photography in the 1830s to the end of Muybridge's career, which culminated with the publication of his encyclopedic work, Animal Locomotion, in 1887. The photographs and objects are drawn largely from the collection of the Cantor Center and supplemented with a selection of stop-action photographs from other private and public collections. Represented will be the work of, among others, Talbot, Rejlander, Maray, Eakins, Edison, and the Lumiere Frères.