'The story goes that in 1872 the Califor-nian rail-road tycoon and race-horse breeder Leland Stanford [naamgever van de universiteit, MK] got into an argument over whether a galloping horse ever has all four hooves off the ground. Experts and artists alike agreed that horses always kept at least some contact with the ground, but Stanford decided he knew better and bet $25,000 ($500,000 today) that horses sometimes left the ground completely. As horses' legs move too quickly for anyone to see exactly what happens, Stanford hired an English photographer named Eadweard Muybridge with the intention of capturing the truth on a photographic plate. [...] Muybridge set up a battery of 12 cameras parallel to a racetrack in Sacramento, with each camera's shutter connected to a wire stretched across the racetrack. As the horse galloped past, its legs tripped the shutters in sequence, creating a series of photographs showing the position of the horse at each instant. Muy-bridge stuck the images on a rotating disc and shone a light through them. The flickering images proved that Stanford was right: the horse did, in fact, sometimes have all four hooves off the ground.'James Dyson, History of Great Inventions (Constable, Londen, 2001;p. 113)
Als fragmentatie het kernwoord van het Modernisme is, en dat is het, dan is Muybridge één van haar wegbereiders (no pun intended). Of zoals zijn biograaf, Rebecca Solnit, geciteerd door The digital journalist het formuleert: 'He is the man who split the second, as dramatic and far-reaching an action as the splitting of the atom.'
Foto's: Eadweard Muybridge.
Verwant: Freud.
