Das Pferd in Bewegung, 1878

About the Work

Taken in "56 photographic snapshots" on albumen paper, Eadweard Muybridge recorded the movement of the horse and thus produced proof in 1878 that the creature briefly lifts all four legs off the ground and "hovers" in the air while it is galloping. Muybridge founded serial photography using technically complicated structures consisting of 12, 24 and eventually 36 cameras which took pictures in sequence. These early serial pictures and studies of human and animal movement sequences, known as chronophotography, provided important impulses for the development of moving pictures and are forerunners of the cinema film. Photography and film were, at the time, still very new technologies.