Muybridge. Man in motion

ROBERT BARTLETT HAAS, Muybridge. Man in motion, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, University of California Press, 1976, 4to, pp. xi, 207, illus., £12.00. The English-born photographer, Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) was the first to capture instantaneous motion on film and to project it on a screen, and the first successfully to develop a method of analysing movement into continuous series of still photographs. He thus became one of the pioneers of film. Using athletes, girls, and children, himself, as well as horses and other animals as subjects, his revelations of human and animal movement were revolutionary. Thus he verified the long contested suggestion that at one point a galloping horse's feet are all clear of the ground. His extensive labours revealed the potential of the moving picture, and they are described here in an excellent book. The author has worked on his topic for twenty years and has traced the details of Muybridge's colourful and remarkable career. There is also his elegant photographic studies of American scenery and the Medoc Indian war, and all is discussed in a readable and fully documented and illustrated book, which is a credit to the publisher as well as to the author. It can be thoroughly recommended as a contribution to the history of biology as well as to the history of photography.