Animal Locomotion

About this item

Animal Locomotion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements was produced between 1884 and 1887 with the support of the University of Pennsylvania, and issued as 781 collotype plates. Each plate presents a grid of sequential exposures — a body walking, running, jumping, lifting, throwing, climbing stairs, standing up from a chair — recorded by a bank of cameras fired in succession as the subject crossed the field.

The work grew out of a narrower commission. From the early 1870s Leland Stanford engaged Muybridge to photograph his trotting horses in order to settle whether a horse ever has all four feet off the ground. On 15 June 1878 at Stanford’s Palo Alto farm, Muybridge captured a usable sequence of the mare Sallie Gardner, published as the cabinet card series The Horse in Motion. It answered the question — unsupported transit is real — and revealed something nobody had asked about: the moment of suspension looks nothing like the extended “flying gallop” that painters had been drawing for millennia.

Muybridge went on to build the zoopraxiscope, a projecting device that returned the sequences to apparent motion, and it stands among the immediate ancestors of projected film. The frequently repeated claim that Stanford wagered $25,000 on the outcome has no contemporary documentation and should be treated as unverified.

Why it is in the collection

Because it is the clearest instance in the collection of an instrument overturning confident, widespread, direct human observation. Generations of painters, many of them people who worked with horses daily, had drawn a pose that does not occur. They were not careless. The event is simply faster than human vision can resolve, and no amount of careful looking would have corrected it.

The record also carries something we think a collection should not quietly drop. In 1874 Muybridge shot and killed Harry Larkyns, his wife’s lover; a jury rejected an insanity defense and acquitted him on the grounds that the killing was justifiable. He resumed work, and Stanford employed him afterward. The plates remain accurate. Both facts belong in the record.