Eadweard Muybridge
April 2, 2025 - August 21, 2025
Tower room.
Curators: 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 held various jobs before devoting himself to photography. In his early days as a photographer, he took stereoscopic views and urban scenes of San Francisco and its surroundings, and also participated in government-sponsored exploration missions, such as those to Yosemite Valley and Alaska, where he took photographs of natural landscapes with a sublime aesthetic. During the 1860s, he also traveled through Central America, collecting images with the same themes.
His photographic work includes notable research into the movement of both animal and human bodies, in which, for the first time in history, the development of movement was captured graphically. Using several synchronized cameras to generate a series of sequential photographs, Muybridge was able to visually capture the different phases of movement, phases that the human eye is unable to distinguish individually. These images were published in the 11-volume work Animal Locomotion (1887), which was followed by other works such as The Attitudes of Animals in Motion (1881), The Human Figure in Motion (1901), and Animals in Motion (1902). In relation to his photographs depicting body movement, in 1879 he invented the Zoopraxiscope, a device that combined the capabilities of the magic lantern and optical image magnification instruments, allowing photographs to be projected in sequence, creating a perception of continuous movement, of moving film, and thus becoming a precursor to the cinematograph.
Muybridge's photographs capture the construction of the human and animal body and its movement almost 40 years before artists such as Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) revolutionized painting with their interpretation of reality based on overlapping planes in works such as Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) by the former, and Nude Descending a Staircase II (1912) by the latter, which precisely captures the sequence of movement of the human body.
RELATED ACTIVITIES
April 2 -Masterclass with Valentín Vallhonrat, curator of the exhibition "Eadweard Muybridge"
Date
April 2, 2025