Skip to main content

Distributed for Solar Books

Muybridge: The Eye in Motion

Much of contemporary visual culture can be traced directly to the work of Eadweard Muybridge, photographer and film pioneer. In Muybridge: The Eye In Motion, Stephen Barber analyses Muybridge’s prodigious output principally through the photographer’s own scrapbook, a multi-dimensional and unprecedented “memory-book” that was created in the final years of his life. Based on this extensive primary research into Muybridge’s personal archive, this innovative and ground-breaking book illuminates both the preoccupations behind his influence on twentieth-century artists like Francis Bacon, his role in the origins of cinema, and his early prefiguring of the digital world. The result is an authoritative and original look at the man, his body of work, and his influence.
 
Muybridge’s work was powered by an extreme obsessiveness and excess that enabled him to negate all preconceptions of art and to reconceptualize the dynamics of corporeal and urban forms. Above all, Muybridge envisioned the future of cinema by creating a moving-image projector—the zoopraxiscope—and by constructing the first identifiably cinematic space to project his compositions for an audience.
 
Intended for readers and students of film and art history, Muybridge: The Eye In Motion is the first-ever study focused directly on the relevance of Muybridge’s work for contemporary digital cultures. Complete with striking illustrations and outstanding reproductions of archival photographs, Barber’s book is the most comprehensive and fully-researched account of Muybridge’s contribution to the origins of film and the best new history of visual culture in years.

200 pages | 50 halftones | 7 x 10 | © 2012

Solar Film Directives

Art: Photography

Film Studies


Solar Books image

View all books from Solar Books

Table of Contents

PART ONE: Muybridge’s Eye in Motion
Visualising Memory
    1. Introduction: Muybridge’s Eye in Motion
    2. Documenting Film’s Origins: The Scrapbook
    3. Traces: Scraps, Fragments, Residues
    4. Immediacy and Memory
    5. Narrative Erasures
Muybridge Projections
    6. Itineraries and Dead-Ends
    7. Topographies of the Body and the City
    8. An Eye into the Void
    9. Borderlines and Tracking-Shots
    10. Urban Panoramas
    11. Horse Latitudes
    12. Projecting Obsessions
    13. Malfunctions and Breakdowns
    14. The Spectacular
    15. Excessive Images
    16. Future Vision Laboratories
    17. ‘If this book is lost . . .’
Lost Archives
    18. Phantoms
    19. The Digital Archive
    20. The Corporeal Archive
    21. The Scrapbook’s Double
    22. Archival Oblivion: Ruins
    23. Archival Time
    24. Archival Eyes in Motion
    25. Film’s Origins, Film’s Vanishings
    Notes
PART TWO: The Devil Knows: The Skladanowsky Brothers and Muybridge
    1. Introduction: Moving-Image Tricksters
    2. Film’s Devils: The Skladanowsky Brothers
    3. The Wintergarten Projections
    4. The Skladanowsky Films
    5. The Skladanowsky Brothers and Muybridge: Memory and Oblivion
    Notes
PART THREE: Muybridge’s Scrapbook: Twenty-Five Disassembled Fragments
    Opening Projection
    Scrapbook Fragments 2–24
    Coda: Closing Projection

List of Images
Bibliography
Acknowledgements

Be the first to know

Get the latest updates on new releases, special offers, and media highlights when you subscribe to our email lists!

Sign up here for updates about the Press