Department of the History of Art & The Center for Ideas and Society
European Trajectories Lunch Talk Series

Eadweard Muybridge’s Photographic and Moving-Image Experiments: Itinerant Archives and Urban Obsessions
Stephen Barber, Ph.D. (Professor of Art and Film History, Kingston University, London)

Eadweard Muybridge’s innovations in photographic and moving-image cultures were immensely influential across the final decades of the nineteenth century, then for twentieth century artists such as Francis Bacon and Marcel Duchamp, and remain provocative and inspirational for contemporary artists, filmmakers, choreographers and digital-media creators. He travelled relentlessly from his arrival in the USA in 1850 at the age of twenty until his return to the UK in 1894, accumulating a vast itinerant archive of his work which he devoted his final decade to distilling into the form of an immense, multi-layered scrapbook intended for future researchers. Alongside his photographing with multiple cameras of human and animal movement, Muybridge undertook international tours with his ‘Zoopraxiscope’ projector, astonishing audiences of artists and scientists in every city in which he appeared. He was also a self-confessed (but exonerated) murderer. Based on extensive research into Muybridge’s little-known personal archive, this talk will examine three aspects of the work of this legendary figure: his experimentations with representing urban space, especially in the form of street-photography and San Francisco panoramas; his obsessive accumulation of his archive; and his moving-image public projections in Europe and at his own self-designed auditorium at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, in the years immediately before the origins of cinema.

Stephen Barber is a Professor of Art and Film History and a Research Centre Director at Kingston University London, and a Fellow of the Berlin Free University. He is the author of two books on Muybridge, Muybridge: The Eye in Motion and The Projectionists, as well as many books on film, art and urban cultures. As a Huntington Library Fellow, he is currently preparing a new book, Muybridge in the Cities.