Summer exhibition at the Rijksmuseum: Stop-Motion. The Photography of Muybridge & Marey
Publicatiedatum: 11 april 2024 - 07:00
This summer the Rijksmuseum presents its first ever exhibition of work by the world famous British-American photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904). The selection of 25 photographs includes images that captured the movements of animals and humans for the first time. Most of the prints come from the collection of Amsterdam’s Rijksakademie van beelden kunsten (State Academy of Fine Arts); the remainder are from the Rijksmuseum collection. The exhibition also includes glass negatives by the French scientist and photographer Étienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904), who conducted similar studies of movement in the same period as Muybridge. The Rijksmuseum received these glass negatives as a gift in 2020. Stop-Motion. The Photography of Muybridge & Marey runs from 5 July to 1 September 2024 in the Rijksmuseum’s photography gallery.
This Rijksmuseum exhibition presents a unique moment in the history of science, art and photography: when the camera surpassed the human eye to become an essential tool for observing and representing the world around us.
Taco Dibbits, Director of the Rijksmuseum
Achieving the impossible
In 1872 the British-American photographer Eadweard Muybridge attempted to do something that until then had seemed impossible. He wanted to solve the mystery of whether all four hooves of a galloping horse lift off the ground at the same time. Muybridge connected a large number of cameras to capture a rapid sequence of images of a horse’s movements, from a variety of angles. What he discovered was that while all four hooves do indeed leave the ground, they do so in a very different manner from the way artists had always depicted them.
Megaproject
This proved the camera could be used to do something the human eye was unable to do: it could capture and analyse rapid movement. Muybridge then expanded his experimental work into a megaproject that encompassed 28,000 shots of humans and animals in motion. He published the results in 1887 in Animal Locomotion, a loose-leaf book of photographs of elephants, ostriches, eagles, tigers, dogs, cats and many other wild and domestic animals. The majority of Muybridge’s photographs captured human movement, however. He instructed his human subjects to perform a wide variety of actions, from walking and climbing stairs to jumping into a haystack, carrying a bucket and picking up a handkerchief.
Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten
Amsterdam’s Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten (State Academy of Fine Arts) was among the many institutions that were quick to snap up Muybridge prints – it acquired nearly a hundred of his photographs around 1890. The academy’s students and artists must surely have studied the images with care to ensure they did not make the same mistakes as those artists who were still unaware of Muybridge’s experiments.
Marey
French scientist Étienne-Jules Marey was an almost exact contemporary of Muybridge (both were born in 1830 and died in 1904), and he conducted very similar studies of motion. The biggest difference between the work of Muybridge and Marey is that the latter captured sequences of shots on single photographic plates; the images in the resulting exposures partially overlapped and could not be viewed separately. The Rijksmuseum was gifted 30 of Marey’s negatives in 2020. The images show a range of sporting activities, including hurdling, box jumping, fencing, football and high jumping. The exhibition includes a selection of these photographs.
The exhibition Stop-Motion. The Photography of Muybridge & Marey has been made possible in part by a major loan from the RCE (Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed)/Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten and donations to the Rijksmuseum photography collection.
Vital support
The Rijksmuseum is grateful for all the forms of support it receives. Government funding, contributions from the business sector and funding organisations, as well as gifts, bequests and Friends are all of vital importance to the Rijksmuseum.
