Image: Moving Skip Rope, 1952
Gelatin silver print; <16 cm x 25 cm (6.3 in. x 9.84 in.)>
Purchase; Palm Press, with assistance from Patrons of Art; August 1989
812 C-R Box 2 / HC07-0282
February 13 – April 25, 2025
Atrium Gallery, Jane Lutnick Fine Arts Center
Opening: February 12, 2025, 5:00 to 7:00 p.m.
Hours:
Monday–Friday, 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Weekends, noon to 5:00 p.m.
Photography means writing or drawing with light; the ability to create memetic images solely by the action of light. This process -part science and part art- was greeted with much enthusiasm and wonder upon its introduction in 1839 by its co-inventors, Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre (1787-1851) in France and William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) in England.
The Daguerreotype named after its inventor was a one-of-a-kind image produced on a copper plate. The Talbotype or Calotype was a paper positive made from a paper negative. Neither of these photographic methods had the ability to stop motion or to capture the unseen. Both were impeded by the slowness of the emulsion to interact with light resulting in exposures of many seconds in the creation of the first photographs. This slowness limited early photographic subject matter to still-lives made in the studio or to scenes of nature or architecture made outdoors. After much experimentation both the Daguerreotype and the Collotype where able to capture the likeness of a person by the mid – 1840s.
Both Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) born in England and Harold Edgerton (1903-1990) born in Fremont, Nebraska made important contributions to the art and science of photography. Muybridge’s corresponding use of the following photographic technological innovations from the mid- 19th century included the invention of the shutter, the anastigmatic lens, the light meter, the dry plate negative, and the standardization of the manufacture of this equipment and material.
Amasa Leland Stanford (1824 –1893) president of the Central Pacific Railroad until 1893, and the Southern Pacific, until 1890 and a former governor of California became Muybridge’s patron and made the engineering and manufacturing resources of his railroads available to Muybridge. His interest in the “step” and “stride” of horses dated to 1872, the year he met Stanford who asked him to resolve a debate among horse enthusiasts: When a horse was trotting (or galloping), did all four of its hooves leave the ground simultaneously? The answer, as Muybridge proved in a photographic project that stretched from 1872 to 1879, was yes. These resources allowed him to invent a 12-camera setup using dry plate negatives that made fast motion sequential photographs of animals and people moving in rapid secession possible.
After this break-through and a falling out with Stanford over copyrights, Muybridge relocated to the University of Pennsylvania when he was offered a research fellowship in 1883. Muybridge and his team made images of animals from the veterinary hospital and the Philadelphia Zoo, along with scores of Penn professors, athletes, students, and patients from the Blockley Almshouse, located next to Penn at the time, and residents of Philadelphia. These photographs became the first scientific study of motion sponsored by a university when a selection of the work was published in 1887 through a subscription-based portfolio, where parties could choose 100 plates, from a diverse catalog of 781, for $100.
Harold Edgerton (1903-1990) continued the evolution of highspeed motion photography in the 20th century. His principal contribution was the use of the stroboscope to study the movement of electric motors while a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology beginning in 1925 and culminating in his doctorate in 1931. The stroboscope generates brief, repeated bursts of light, which allow an observer to view moving objects in a series of static, images, rather than a single continuous blur. By synchronizing strobe flashes with the motion being examined then taking a series of photos through an open shutter at the rate of many flashes per second, Edgerton invented ultra-high-speed and stop-action photography in 1931. His film Quicker’n a Wink won an Oscar in 1940 for Best Short Subject. The film about Edgerton’s work in stroboscopic photography was one of the ways that the public was introduced to this new method of photography; it was a collaboration between Edgerton and MGM Studios.
The publication of Flash in 1939 was another instance of introducing stroboscopic photography to a wider public during the centenary of the announcement of the invention of photography by Edgerton. It was a how to book as well as a theoretical book on how to use this new tool. Between 1933 and 1966, Edgerton applied for forty-five patents for various strobe and electrical engineering devices. He obtained a patent for the stroboscope–a high-powered repeatable flash device–in 1949. By harnessing the speed of light to make ultra-high-speed and stop-action photography. Edgerton was able to photograph the speed of a bullet at mid-flight. Both Edgerton and Muybridge made possible photography’s ability to capture the unseen at the spur of a moment, which became the ethos of photography for much of the 20th century exemplified by photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Brassai, Larry Fink and Lisette Model.
