Free Soul of the World by Christopher Dewdney Page B

you look into the lens of a camera that’s about to take your picture, you’re looking into the future, while posterity looks back at you out of its glass eye.
    I’ve always been fascinated by a daguerreotype of my grandmother taken when she was a young woman in Europe. She is in half profile, her hair up in a languorous coiffure, a few studied strands trailing over her ears. She is wearing a tailored dress with a high, elegant collar adorned with a silver pin. Her shoulders are draped in a fur wrap, and a magnificent black ostrich-feather hat surmounts everything. She is striking. And she is young, perhaps only eighteen. There is something immediately accessible about this photograph; it seems much more recent than its hundred and ten years. You can see by a faint stiffness to her pose that the photographer had told her to remain still. The exposure must have taken a few seconds.
    It was this limitation of still photography that irked Muybridge. He wanted to go further into the instantaneous, to photograph the moving world. He began to experiment with new lenses and shutters to increase the speed of his camera, and by 1870 his diligence had paid off. His pioneering photographs of moving people and animals astonished audiences at exhibitions, and his work gained him a national reputation. Leland Stanford, a retired railway engineer and horse breeder, invited him to his ranch in Sacramento, where, in 1873, he began to fund Muybridge’s research into motion photography.
    Muybridge used Stanford’s horses as his subjects, photographing them as they walked, trotted and galloped. In order to photograph the thoroughbreeds, he had to improve his shutter speed even further. Normally, the daguerreotype cameras of his day had an exposure time of several seconds; sitting for a portrait, as my grandmotherhad done, meant that you had to remain absolutely still for the duration of the exposure. This would not do for a galloping horse. Muybridge developed faster shutter speeds and film until, by 1877, he had achieved a shutter speed of 1/2,000 of a second, at the limit of what the most accurate clocks of his day could measure. He could now photograph a world previously invisible to the human eye: the realm of the super-fast.
    Stanford had an ulterior motive for hiring Muybridge. In the nineteenth century there was an ongoing argument as to whether or not a galloping horse ever lifted all four hooves off the ground. One side, the pragmatists, claimed that a running horse needed to have at least one hoof on the ground: otherwise it would stumble. The other side, the romantics, said that a horse became airborne in mid-stride, and they called their version of equine locomotion “unsupported transit.” It was a difficult point to settle. Neither group could claim precedence because no one could actually see what was going on beneath a galloping horse. Anything that takes place in less than a tenth of second is beyond our ability to discern clearly.
    On the morning of June 14, 1878, racing enthusiasts and newspapermen lined the track at Leland Stanford’s Palo Alto Stock Farm. On one side of the track stood a whitewashed shed with a long, horizontal window that opened at waist level. Poking through the window, like cannons through portholes, were a dozen cameras, each fitted with two lenses. Across from them Muybridge had set up a white canvas backdrop marked with vertical lines at two-foot intervals. The track had been laid with electric trip wires to trigger each of the cameras’ shutters in succession as the horse ran by.
    When everything was ready the horse and rider set off on their journey into time and history. The cameras worked without a hitch. Muybridge quickly developed the photos and the results were stunning:perfect images of horse and rider caught in frames of time less than 1/2,000 of second long. And when the horse was in mid-stride, all four hooves were off the ground. The “unsupported transit” believers won the day.