The History of Motion Photography

Since I have decided to create images using motion and movement photography for my Major Practical Project, I thought it would only be helpful to re-read previous research that I have done about motion photography, at the same time I can learn more and research in depth, the real history of the motion photograph.

Nude Descending a Staircase
Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase shows a human figure in motion, in a style inspired by Cubist ideas about the deconstruction of forms.  The image does not show an exact nude but shows abstract lines and planes. The lines in the image show the static positions of the body and create a rhythmic sense of motion and the shaded planes give depth and volume to her form.  It is only in our own mind's in which we see the motion and the nude.
This piece of art was one of the earliest attempts to try and depict motion using the medium of paint. It's conception owed something to the newborn cinema and to photographic studies of the living body in motion, like those of Marey and Muybridge. Cubist paintings around this time were necessarily static and this was the Cubist theory, but instead of creating a piece of work that showed a subject's multiple views at one moment at a time, Duchamp created a piece that showed a subject from one view at multiple moments together. Marcel Duchamp gave the Cubists 'vitality' in the movement which no-one apart from Muybridge had done before.
Duchamp did not mean to mock Cubism by 'deconstruction of form' but was trying to show a new way of seeing, the piece was rejected by the Salon des Independents because members of the jury felt that he was making fun of Cubist art, but viewers didn't just dislike the painting, they saw it as a threat - un-american. American's presumed paintings should be of historical scenes, presidents etc, there was nudes too but they were realistic depictions of lounging women with big breasts. Duchamp's painting hit boundaries with the people and they weren't able to handle the fact he re-defined what originality was and changed the dead academic language of painting. He brought rebellion to art which made viewers think, but because the art piece caused an uproar which both outraged many people, it also made Duchamp famous in America.

His piece of Cubist artwork is here below alongside Eliot Elisofon's piece mimicking Duchamp's work.

Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending Staircase No. 2, 1912
Eliot Elisofon, Marcel Duchamp Descending a Staircase, 1952

Motion - Eadweard Muybridge
I have looked into the work of Eadweard Muybridge a lot before in previous projects. I was very interested in the motion work that he produced and it really made me want to know more. Here below is Muybridge's interpretation of Duchamp's Nude descending a Staircase, but taken in different frames in photography.

Eadweard Muybridge, Nude Descending a Staircase from
Animal Locomotion, 1887

Here I have added a screen shot image of an essay that I completed in my first year about Eadweard Muybridge's work. I can use this as my research to re-read about him and his work.

Muybridge in 1872, was the man who questioned whether when a horse galloped, does all there feet leave the ground at one time. Therefore came up with an idea of using multiple cameras to capture a galloping horse in action. Using roughly 16 cameras, he proved his point that whilst galloping a horse lifts all four hooves in air at the same time.  From 1884-1887 he used the same technique but with human movements in motion.  This is a technique that is very simple in todays world, but were extremely technically skilled back then. 

Because of his work using different frames per second, this technique has been improved each generation to bring us to where we are today, anything that creates a motion can be captured, in very different ways too. 

I will experiment with my motion photography but will pay particular attention to the way the body moves, and will look into the background of the body.  With looking at history of movement as well as history of the body/nude I can work towards an interesting piece of work including both.