The Horse in Motion
An additional card reprinted the single image of the horse "Occident" trotting at high speed, which had previously been published by Muybridge in 1877.
The series became the first example of chronophotography, an early method to photographically record the passing of time, mainly used to document the different phases of locomotion for scientific study.
[3] Muybridge did project moving images from his photographs with his Zoopraxiscope, from 1880 to 1895, but these were painted on discs and his technique was no more advanced than similar earlier demonstrations (for instance those by Franz von Uchatius in 1853).
[4] Muybridge's work was commissioned by Leland Stanford, the industrialist, former Governor of California, and horseman, who was interested in horse gait analysis.
In 1882, Stanford had a book published about the project, also entitled The Horse in Motion, with circa 100 plates of silhouettes based on the photographs, and analytical text by his friend and physician J.D.B.
[citation needed] Stanford also had an interest in art and science, in which he looked for illustration and affirmation of his ideas and observations about the horse's motions, but got frustrated with the lack of clarity on the subject.
[12] Years later, he explained: "I have for a long time entertained the opinion that the accepted theory of the relative positions of the feet of horses in rapid motion was erroneous.
[12] Although Stanford later claimed he did not contemplate publishing the results, the local press was informed and it was hailed as a triumph in photography by the Daily Alta California.
In July 1877, Muybridge worked on a series of progressively clearer, single photographs of Occident, at a racing-speed gait[15] at the Union Park Racetrack in Sacramento, California.
The resulting negatives were tiny, but had fine details, and proved that the trotting horse assumes inconceivable positions that seemed to have nothing in common with the gracefulness that people associated with it.
The Sacramento Daily Union reported that:It was shown that the supposed superior grace of the horse while running is in reality a delusion: that the feet are gotten into all sorts of queer positions.
[22] The photographic series was immediately hailed as a breakthrough success by the reporters that attended the June 15 presentation, and quickly garnered worldwide acclaim.
[24] La Nature published several series in December and received a very enthusiastic response from Étienne-Jules Marey, a leading expert on animal locomotion.
In 1881, he collected the images in the portfolio The Attitudes of Animals in Motion, but kept the edition very limited because of plans for related book projects with Stanford and Marey.
To demonstrate how the awkward positions in his photographs really made up the graceful movements, he developed a phenakistiscope-based projector with the images traced onto glass disks.
[27] Stanford commissioned the book The Horse in Motion: as shown by Instantaneous Photography with a Study on Animal Mechanics founded on Anatomy and the Revelations of the Camera in which is demonstrated The Theory of Quadrupedal Locomotion, written by his friend and physician J. D. B. Stillman; it was published by Osgood and Company.
As a result, Britain's Royal Society of Arts, which earlier had offered to finance further photographic studies by Muybridge of animal movement, withdrew the funding.
Muybridge's widely publicized work convinced many more people that the medium could be more reliable than the naked eye and even demonstrated that it could reveal otherwise undiscernable natural principles.
