Muybridge's Innovation
While today it is easy to observe the photographs by Muybridge and analyze them objectively, it is important to remember the context in which the experiments occurred. For those who question the legitimacy of his moving photos as pornography or simply meaningless, the technology of the time must be kept in mind.
Throughout history the human body has been observed and documented for artistic and scientific purposes. The original pictures and sculptures of human bodies were crude in their design and implementation, but nonetheless marked an important step in artistic and scientific discovery. Da Vinci sketched images of naked men and women, and his physical inquiries are not perceived as pornography, but rather the foundation of modern studies of the anatomy. Thus, I was surprised when Muybridge's work was questioned in class.
He was the first person to develop a method for taking photographs in rapid succession. This elementary motion picture was an astonishing innovation in itself. The ability to observe minute movements that had escaped human understanding prior to his machine was in itself the experiment. It is only the natural progress of human art, from sculptures, painting, and murals, to photographs, and finally moving pictures. One should not be astonished to find naked bodies in any mode of art.
Furthermore, it may be that due to the moving nature of the pictures, we expect a higher level of quality from the art. We laugh at the inability of the pictures to be completely instantaneous, sharp, and clear. We dismiss the inability to capture many motions as poor art and a useless experiment. We simply cannot understand the novelty of the zooropraxiscope and the studies of animal locomotion as the society of the late 1800s did.
Overall, I feel that Muybridge's photographs were definitely a fusion of art and science, and in no way pornographic.
posted by judge at 12:42 PM
1 Comments:
hi caleb-- i definitely agree with your point that although we might giggle at the photographs today, they certainly would have carried radically different meanings to 19th century viewers. I don't recall anyone calling the experiment (?) useless--in fact, we talked about the use of the photographs by physiologists, zoologists, artists and other important folks. And indeed, Muybridge's work is named as the pre-cursor to cinema for a reason.
As for the pornography issue, I'll reiterate what I think I heard in class: nothing can be inherently "pornographic" since the obscene depends upon criteria determined by society, the law, police, etc, .... However, no matter how Muybridge intended the series to be received, the photographs may stillhave been put to....well, less than "legitimate" scientific purposes (perhaps even as a kind of entertainment or spectacle that stands apart from objective, scientific interest in the photographic subjects) We'd have to do a lot more research to figure out how Muybridge's photographs were received by the public more generally to get at these questions (for example: were they censored in any way? Much of what we call high art today, for example, has some kind of censorship history behind it)
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