Eadweard Muybridge
2 APR '25 - 21 AUG '25
Tower room.
Commissioners: Valentín Vallhonrat and Ignacio Miguéliz
Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) was a photographer of English origin who settled in the United States in 1851, where he worked in various jobs before devoting himself to photography. In his beginnings as a photographer he made stereoscopic views, urban views of San Francisco and its surroundings, and also participated in exploration missions promoted by the government, such as those to Yosemite Valley or Alaska, where he took photographs of natural landscapes within an aesthetic of the sublime. During the 1960s he also traveled through Central America, collecting images with the same themes.
Within his photographic production, his research on the movement of the body, both animal and human, stands out, in which for the first time in history the development of the same was recorded graphically. Using several cameras synchronized with each other, which generated several sequential photographs, Muybridge managed to capture visually the different phases of movement, phases that the human eye is not able to individualize. These images were published in the 11-volume Animal locomotion (1887), followed by other works such as The Attitudes of Animal in motion (1881), The Human figure in motion (1901) and Animals in motion (1902). In relation to his photographs with the representation of the movement of the body, in 1879 he invented the Zoopraxiscope, a device that combined the powers of the magic lantern and optical instruments of image enlargement, in such a way that allowed the projection of photographs in a chained way generating a perception of continuous movement, of film in motion, being a forerunner of the cinematograph.
Muybridge's photographs show the construction of the human and animal body and its movement almost 40 years before authors such as Pablo Picasso or Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) revolutionized painting with their interpretation of reality based on superimposed planes in works such as Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) by the former, or Nude Descending a Staircase II (1912) by the latter, which precisely captures the sequence of movement of the human body.
RELATED ACTIVITIES
2 APR - Masterclass by Valentin Vallhonrat, curator of the exhibition "Eadweard Muybridge".
Date
April 2, 2025