COMMON just performed GLORY with @JohnLegend at the Final @JoeBiden and @KamalaHarris Rally on Election Eve in Philadelphia. Vote tomorrow. Let’s make history.
"....'See how curiously,' said Mr. Muybridge, referring to a photographic series (Plate 288 shown above) of one of our most prominent University baseball nine, 'and yet how perfectly, this plate illustrates the occurrence of an error in catching.' True enough. In the successive pictures the ball is muffed, strikes the player's thigh, runs up under his arm and across his back, while he is looking eagerly on the wrong side for it." - The Pennsylvanian, 1886
In the 19th century the railroad, the telegraph and the camera transformed our experience of space and time. JMW Turner's painting Rain, Steam, and Speed - The Great Western Railway documents in oil paint the beginnings of this perceptual shift. In Turner's work, the powerful steam engine races from the painting's perspectival vanishing point into the viewer's space, breaking free of pictorial constraints.
JMW Turner Rain, Steam, and Speed - The Great Western Railway 36"x48" oil on canvas 1844 National Gallery, London
Eadweard Muybridge, born 182 years ago today, took Turner's artistic explorations and expanded upon them. Muybridge's photographic stop action photos revolutionized our understanding of human and animal movement.
Not content with the long exposure times needed to create photographic plates, Muybridge's artistic explorations with instantaneous photography led to his groundbreaking motion studies. In the 1870s, at the Palo Alto Stock Farm owned by railroad baron and former California Governor Leland Stanford, Eadweard Muybridge invented his photographic method for the capture of high-speed action. Muybridge devised a system for documenting animal locomotion by using a series of cameras which produced sequential images of stilled movement on glass photographic plates. These photographs were arguably the first successful photographs of rapid motion and they revolutionized photography and the natural sciences.
These sequential images seemed to cut time into slices. The images recorded fractions of a second, which the unaided human eye had not been able to perceive before. Soon Muybridge would set his photographs into motion with his early motion picture device the Zoopraxiscope and hand drawn silhouettes of his horse in motion photos seemed to gallop fluidly when viewed through the machine.
Muybridge’s Zoopraxiscope on display at the Kingston Museum Kingston upon Thames, UK
Muybridge's Zoopraxiscope inspired Thomas Edison and William Kennedy Dickson's Kinetoscope, which in time led to the modern film projector.
After his photographic success in California, Eadweard Muybridge moved east and continued his studies with the assistance of the University of Pennsylvania in the 1880's.
Eadweard Muybridge's outdoor camera house, 36th and Pine Streets, Philadelphia
Members of the commission overseeing Muybridge's work at Penn included Thomas Eakins as well as professors from Penn's Medical, Veterinary and Engineering Schools. Student-athlete's and faculty members at Penn posed for Muybridge's motion studies.
Thomas Eakins A May Morning in the Park (The Fairman Rogers Four-in-Hand) 23 3/4" x 36" oil on canvas 1879-1880 Collection Philadelphia Museum of Art
The artist Thomas Eakins, inspired by his interactions with Muybridge in Philadelphia, painted A May Morning in the Park (The Fairman Rogers Four-in-Hand). Eakin's depiction of a horse and carriage in stop-action motion was unprecedented in painting and seemed off putting to many contemporary viewers. One critic of the time wrote, "The effect of the picture as a whole it is impossible to accept as true, unless it be that Mr. Eakins' perceptions are right and those of everybody else are wrong." Eakin's dismissed the criticism and continued his explorations of motion in his photographic and painted works.
Muybridge's groundbreaking work continues to influence artists across the globe. The Japanese filmmaker Koji Yammamura's animated work Muybridge's Strings is a poetic homage to Muybridge and a poignant contemplation of time and memory: "Though separated by a century and an ocean, the lives of photographer Eadweard Muybridge and that of a Japanese mother clash poetically, sharing the irrepressible human desire to make time stand still."
Trailer for the animated film Muybridge's Strings by the Japanese filmmaker Koji Yamamura.
2011 /12 min. 39sec./ 35 mm /No dialogue /Canada, Japan Techniques: Drawing and painting on paper
A CO-PRODUCTION OF THE NATIONAL FILM BOARD OF CANADA, NHK AND POLYGON PICTURES Direction, Script, Editing Koji Yamamura Original Music, Sound Design Normand Roger, Pierre Yves Drapeau, Denis Chartrand Executive Producers David Verrall (NFB), Kenji Saito (NHK), Shuzo John Shiota (Polygon) Producers Michael Fukushima (NFB), Keisuke Tsuchihashi (NHK), Shuzo John Shiota (Polygon)
Henri Maillardet's Automaton at The Franklin Institute
In November 1928, the fire scarred remains of a mechanical boy were dropped off at The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Left in pieces, it took months of painstaking work to reassemble the automaton. Little was known about the history of this extraordinary object. Like the automaton in Brian Selznick's magical, graphic novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret and Martin Scorsese's wonderful film adaptation of the book now simply entitled Hugo, the machine itself provided the clue to its origins.
When the complicated cogs and mechanisms were repaired and the machine was rewound for the first time in decades, the automaton's hand began to draw. Remarkably the machine's mechanical memory, held four drawings and three poems (illustrated below). One of the poems finished with a signature in French, "Ecrit par l'Automate de Maillardet." The mechanical boy signed the name of his creator - Maillardet.
Further research led to the Swiss watch-maker and automaton creator Henri Maillardet. Working primarily in London, Maillardet seems to have created The Franklin Institute's Automaton before 1800 while working in the mechanical shop of Pierre Jaquet-Droz. The Franklin Institute believes that Maillardet created only one other automaton that could write. This missing masterpiece wrote in Chinese and was created for the Emperor of China and given as a gift by King George III of England.
Mysteries still remain. How did the automaton get to the United States? Why did it end up in Philadelphia? A clue might be found in the fire damaged state of the automaton upon its delivery at the Franklin Institute.
It is known that the circus impresario and showman P.T. Barnum collected curios, including automata, and housed them in his museums in New York that were destroyed by fire. Perhaps the Franklin Institute's mechanical boy was saved from P.T. Barnum's smoldering collection - waiting for someone to turn his key once more.
Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret was inspired by the Franklin Institute's Automaton.
In this video shot at the museum, Selznick discusses Maillardet's Automaton and its influence on his book.
Above:
Four Drawings and Three Poem's Written by Maillardet's Restored Automaton at the Franklin Institute
Charles Penniman adjusts Maillardet's Automaton at the Franklin Institute.
A Still From Martin Scorsese's "Hugo" Illustrating His Adaptation of Maillardet's Automaton
Henri Maillardet's Automaton at The Franklin Institute and More From CBS Sunday Morning
Henri Maillardet's Automaton at The Franklin Institute
/ kamalaharris
Kamala's Tiktok: 
/ kamalaharris
Kamala’s Instagram: 
/ kamalaharris
Kamala's Twitch: 
/ kamalaharris
Kamala's Facebook: 
/ kamalaharris
Kamala's Threads: https://www.threads.net/@kamalaharris
#KamalaHarris #Harris2024
