Eadweard Muybridge and Jo Longhurst

Eadweard Muybridge

"Eadweard Muybridge born 9 April 1830 was an English photographer important for his work in photographic studies of motion and in motion-picture projection. He is known for his pioneering work on animal locomotion in 1877 and 1878, he used multiple cameras to capture motion in stop-action photographs.On 15th June 1878 at Stanford's Palo Alto Stock Farm, Muybridge wanted to study the horse at gallop to see whether all four legs would leave the ground at one time. The study is called Sallie Gardner at a Gallop or The Horse in Motion; it shows images of the horse with all feet off the ground.After this magnificent leap in history, Muybridge went onto work at the University of Pennsylvania between 1883 and 1886, producing thousands of humans and animals in motion. Muybridge's innovative camera techniques enabled people to see things otherwise too fast to comprehend, and his sequence images continue to inspire artists from other disciplines to this day."

"Muybridge showed how an image that paralyses motion can catch the fluency of phenomena. He was one of the great photographic thinkers, whose mind reached ahead from still photography towards the inevitable invention of the cinema, which he anticipated by constructing a gadget called a zoopraxiscope that could animate sequences of images to display mules kicking or nymphs dancing.
Muybridge's great achievement was conceptual: he made time visible in space. His studies of locomotion atomise duration into instants. He demonstrates, for instance, what water looks like, second by second, as it is hurled from a bucket by a bizarrely naked female model. With a battery of cameras tripped by electrical switches he captures minute metamorphoses too quick for the blinking human eye. What we see as a sloppy, slurping mess is a rainbow of gravity-defying droplets, then a looped ribbon that twists around itself, next a leaping fish or a slippery mermaid. He seems to have trapped a spirit, compelling wet ectoplasm to solidify in the air – and of course, like many of his Victorian contemporaries, he could do that as well: when photographing the house of a Californian patron, he included the double-exposed ghost of the owner, patrolling the premises to keep an eye on his wife.
Time is a stream, flowing around us and through us, incising lines on faces as it abrades rocks. Almost magically, Muybridge devised ways of enabling us to see that stealthy entropy at work in nature. Time is written into the sedimentary layers of the cliffs he photographed, or computed in the rings of the inconceivably ancient and enormous Californian sequoias. The grandiose vistas he photographed in Yosemite are not only sublime evidence of God's grandeur or America's glory, like the same scenes when looked at through the cameras of Carleton Watkins and Ansel Adams. Muybridge emphasises the destructive and creative power of water, which over millennia carves tracks through mountains. A lake can pretend to be a placid camera, duplicating and inverting the mountains of Yosemite, but in other moods water is aggressive, able to sculpt stone. Muybridge's long exposures make waterfalls or surging creeks look like sharpened wedges or blunt-ended mallets, weapons that enforce geological flux." 

(http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/aug/29/eadweard-muybridge-tate-review) 

There is something of this work that is reminiscent of Jo Longhurst's project The Refusal, Like Muybridge it is a study and presented similarly in what could be considered a very scientific demonstrative way.

"My work with the British show Whippet - a dog bred to an ideal standard - focuses particularly on the evolution of the visual image of the Whippet, and the construction of human identity through the shaping of the figure of the dog.
For several years I worked with top breeders, photographing their dogs by bloodline, exploring their obsessive quest for the perfect dog. As part of my working process I used a variety of photographic equipment normally used to record and classify human physiognomies, including state-of-the-art technologies and those already considered obsolete such as stereoscopic cameras.
The Refusal is shortlisted for The Grange Prize 2012, Art Gallery of Ontario
13 works from this project were on show at the Museum Folkwang, Essen, April-June 2008. These works explore the intimate relationship between human and dog, and question what it is to be human today.
"We react differently to portraits of people than to portraits of animals. Why and in what way? These are the questions the viewer is confronted with when standing before Longhurst’s works.... Despite their utter perfection, they unnerve the viewer through the polarity of rational documentation and emotional-situational depiction" Ute Eskildsen
The Refusal is part of The Worldly House, presented by Tue Greenfort at dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, until 16 September 2012. This archive is housed in a former house for black swans in Karlsaue Park, responding to Donna Haraway's writing on multi-species co-evolution.
The Steidl catalogue, The Refusal, has 66 colour plates, an introduction by Ute Eskildsen and an artist's text"

( http://www.jolonghurst.com/docs/more_info.php?id=1:2264:0:0)