A Centennial Salute to Cinema

Movement Frame By Frame

Pioneering British photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904), a student of locomotion, devoted much of his American career to recording on film each step in the movement of humans and animals.

A published collotype from Muybridge's Animal Locomotion Studies. See image below for uncropped view of one panel from this series. (Photo by Carolyn Long)

Muybridge knew this was necessary in order to reproduce a semblance of motion. Arranging drawings produced from these pictures in a circle on a glass plate, he made a colored print that could be rotated in his Zoopraxiscope projector in the early 1890s. In the early 1890s American and European audiences marveled at Zoopraxiscope images.






A Cyanotype Print of Muybridge's motion studies. The number "5" signifies the placement of this panel in the series.(Photo by Carolyn Long)



Next: Projecting Moving Images

Return to:

Copyright 1995 Smithsonian Institution