SFMOA Showcases Eadweard Muybridge's Contributions To The Art Of Photography

Written by Cathy Bowman Friday, 11 November 2011 22:18

San Francisco, CA - The rows of black-and-white photographs, each slightly different, feel like a slow-motion film: two men boxing, a horse and rider galloping, a cockatoo in flight. Eadweard Muybridge’s groundbreaking work is the focus of “Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change,” which opened Saturday 26^th February 2011  at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOA). The fascinating exhibition, which originated at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., includes more than 300 objects created from 1857 to 1893.The series of sequential photographs will be familiar to viewers fond of Muybridge’s work; he showed that as horses run, they briefly lift all four hooves off the ground. The show is the first retrospective of the artist’s pioneering work. It includes Muybridge’s only surviving Zoopraxiscope — a device he designed in 1879 to project motion pictures.

“Before Muybridge, you could not stop motion with a camera,” says Philip Brookman, chief curator at the Corcoran. “He developed a new technology that completely changed how we see the world.” Although he was born in England, Muybridge spent much of his career as a photographer in San Francisco. The show includes striking panoramic views of The City as well as prints of the construction of City Hall.

Reflecting the rapidly changing world in which he found himself, he traveled widely, documenting the Modoc War and the construction of the railroads in the West.  Muybridge was a master of his craft, climbing into difficult spots to get the perfect shot or using a horse-drawn cart as a portable darkroom. Pushing the limits of technology, he learned to create negatives as large as 17 by 22 inches to produce sweeping landscapes of the Pacific coast, Yosemite and other areas.

Often he manipulated images to create a more dramatic effect, such as painting a moon on a negative and printing it dark to suggest night. Clouds in an 1872 print of Yosemite Valley bear a striking similarity to those in a picture of a lighthouse a year later. Photographers at the time had to do that, Brookman explains, because of the limits of technology. There are several examples of Muybridge’s stop-motion photographs from his Animal Locomotion series. Using as many as 24 cameras and an electric shutter he invented, he was able to photograph humans and animals moving including horses, elephants, camels and other animals walking, running and jumping.

Brookman says Muybridge’s influence is felt in the works of numerous artists who have followed, from Marcel Duchamp’s famous “Nude Descending a Staircase” to U2’s video for their song, “Lemon.” “I hope people will understand the complexity of Muybridge’s vision,” he says. “He was ­incredibly accomplished.”

Founded in 1935, SFMOMA was the first museum on the US West Coast devoted to modern and contemporary art. With strong holdings in photography, painting and sculpture, architecture and design, and media arts, SFMOMA strives to present key examples of Modernism as well as more recent works that reflect a variety of artistic developments occurring regionally, nationally, and around the world. Each year, in addition to organizing ongoing installations of permanent collection works, our curators develop a variety of collection-based presentations to complement the special traveling exhibitions hosted by the museum. Including both modern art masterworks and glimpses of contemporary art in the making, the permanent collection contributes to SFMOMA's standing as a dynamic art center where visitors can learn, reflect, and be inspired. Mario Botta's SFMOMA building is an iconic presence within the cityscape of San Francisco. Since it opened in 1995, the building has become a hub of the downtown South of Market (SoMa) area. It will soon be an even more dynamic destination: SFMOMA is developing a major expansion, designed in collaboration with the architecture firm Snøhetta, to accommodate the ongoing growth of the museum's programs and audiences and to showcase the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection of contemporary art. Visit the museum’s website at … www.sfmoma.org

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