by Edward Ball
MOTION, STUDY
He signed his name in loopy handwriting with extra lines, the kind of thing people sometimes do who have a taste of renown. You could find artists and scientists among his fans, and plenty of ordinary people who liked his play with screens. You could also find schools. Colleges shined up their reputations by having the photographer come in for a show. Muybridge had been looking for a new patron who could pay for his expensive camera work, and he realized that a school with a thick wallet might suffice. He found one, the University of Pennsylvania, a 125-year-old eminence in Philadelphia.
They called themselves the Muybridge Commission, a tableful of men—some rich people, some academics—with links to the university they called Penn, which stood just across the Schuylkill River from the city of Philadelphia. The Muybridge Commission included an art collector, Fairman Rogers, and the school’s provost, William Pepper, plus a bona fide artist, Thomas Eakins. Eakins and Rogers had both seen the Muybridge show. The group put out an invitation to their hero: if he would only do it here, with them, the photographer could produce images by the thousand that dwarfed the Palo Alto pictures in scale and style.1
Muybridge wanted, among other things, to upstage Stanford, and he hoped for a big sequel to what had gone before. He took the Penn deal in early 1883 (“your offer is entirely reasonable,” he wrote, blandly, feigning indifference). He deposited the check with his advance money and moved to Philadelphia in spring 1884. The prospectus he wrote said that Penn, by hiring him, could sweep the terrain of motion studies, pulling together human and animal movement into an immortal archive. Penn had its reasons for reeling him in: the school wanted to burnish its credentials, and trustees thought Muybridge would impart a glow to the campus.
Once again the photographer split the difference between science and art. Penn set up a committee to supervise Muybridge, naming an engineer and a physicist on one hand, a painter and a sculptor on the other. The veterinary program turned one of its buildings into a studio for the “scientist,” while Thomas Eakins’s Academy of the Fine Arts sent assistants and models.2
The idea that Muybridge might enhance Penn’s reputation did not move him to groom himself, or dress better. One of his helpers at the time, Thomas Grier, saw the photographer as a dingy presence around campus. “Muybridge was a peculiar man who did not give a hang for clothes, and we had to keep an eye on him in the studio,” Grier remembered. “I would see him with pants so decrepit that it was not safe for him to go outside.”3 The provost, William Pepper, told a story about the photographer’s response to complaints about his clothes. “What’s the matter with my way of dress?” Muybridge said to Pepper. “Take for example your hat,” the provost answered. “It has a hole in it through which your hair is protruding.” The photographer took off his hat and looked at Pepper. “Well, it does have a hole in it,” he said.4
In a few months others got to know Muybridge. Edward T. Reichert, a doctor at Penn, called him “the most eccentric man I ever knew.” Reichert said, “He was very much of a recluse, so that very few got to know the man, and likely no one ever learned hidden secrets that must have radically influenced his life.” (Some secrets might have been whispered.) Reichert remembered that Muybridge had an appetite for cheese flies, sometimes called “skippers,” little insects about one-fifth of an inch long, that hop around old cheese. “Muybridge’s fondness for skippers (cheese maggots) was amazing and insatiable,” Reichert said in a letter. “He frequently lunched with me in my laboratory, bringing a small package containing his tid-bit, and after he had started to consume this delicacy it was not uncommon for one or more of my guests to find excuses to finish their lunch elsewhere.”5 Reichert did not talk about the photographer’s other eating habits.
At age fifteen, slender and tall, with a flop of straight brown hair, the beautiful boy Leland Stanford Jr. seemed to desire more from Europe than little statues from Mesopotamia. His parents, who wanted to deepen their only child by bathing him in Continental ways, indulged him. And in any case California remained an unpleasant address for anyone named Stanford, so the family planned a return trip to Europe—Leland, Jenny, and Leland Jr. In May 1883 the three Stanfords again sailed from New York, this time intending to stay a year.
They right away split into groups. Jenny’s eyes were bothering her, so she went with her son to Le Havre, on France’s northern coast, to see an ophthalmologist and to take in some of the sharp light over the English Channel. Leland felt weary, so he peeled off from his wife and son for the resort remedy that fit his station: the Bad Kissingen spa in Bavaria. The medicinal springs at the town of Kissingen, in southern Germany, where well-paying clients soaked themselves in hot mineral water for days on end, had become a chic destination to rejuvenate. Czar Alexander II of Russia, Empress Elisabeth of Austria, and Chancellor Otto von Bismarck had all visited. (He didn’t say it, but Stanford probably saw himself as their American equivalent.) After a month in the mineral tubs, Leland felt better.
The family reunited in Paris, Leland and Jenny telling each other they were restored. In November, the Stanfords went to southern France, after that to Italy (Genoa, Venice), and finally to Austria for Christmas in Vienna. Not only did the family fit the emerging template of the rich, grasping Americans with no obligations but to look, eat, and buy, they showed Europe one of the first examples of that stereotype. The weekly uprooting and travel ran the risk of exhausting them, but the Stanfords’ cash, which purchased velvet-lined train cars and circles of attendants and guides, softened the effects of all their shuttling around.
Leland Stanford Jr., age fourteen, 1881 (Illustration Credit c20.1)
On January 1, 1884, in severely cold weather, the family left Vienna, making their way into Turkey and to Istanbul, where there would be good collecting of antiquities for young Leland. In Istanbul, they hired a steam launch, which Leland Jr. told his parents he wanted to captain. The couple acquiesced, ordered the rudder man aside, and the boy piloted the boat from the Golden Horn to the Black Sea, “all day long, with a sharp wind blowing in his face and spray dashing over the deck,” his mother said. The next day Leland Jr. was pale and sick. He recovered somewhat, the requisite shopping was done, and the family reached Athens in mid-January. In Greece, several rare snowstorms threatened to slow the trip, but (as Jenny remembered) Leland Jr. visited a number of temples and oracle sites knee deep in snowdrifts. Then it was on to Naples in mid-February.
Young Leland arrived sick and faint, and his mother described it in the detached way that clings to fear. “He was well enough to leave Naples for Rome, but his health did not improve, and it was deemed advisable to take him to a more bracing climate.” On February 20, the family went north to Florence, “and there the fever which had been smoldering within him broke out in all its malignity,” Jenny remembered. The boy lay burning in the most luxurious suite of the Bristol Hotel. His parents retained a roomful of nuns from a nearby convent to nurse him. Doctors applied the medicine they knew: they wrapped Leland Jr. in ice-cold wet sheets, which he pleaded to have taken away. The clatter of carriages outside came through the window, so the Stanfords paid the hotel manager to spread straw on the street to stifle the noise.
Jenny watched her son suffer. “For three weeks, alternate hope and fear reigned in the darkened room, while the silver cord was loosening day by day,” his mother said. “His mind was lucid at times and at times wandering, but even in his delirium he was always the pure-hearted youth that he had been in health.”6 He died on March 13, age fifteen years, ten months.
His father, the monopolist and master of his world, “broke down completely.” Leland, according to one biographer, “threw himself on a couch in the room adjoining that in which lay the earthly remains of young Leland” and writhed and wept, day in and day out. Jenny said she feared for her husband’s reason and for his life. While in that state, as he remembered it, Stanford said to himself, like an incantation, “I now have nothing to live for.”
Muybridge, a
t this moment, had little idea what the Stanfords were doing; he did not know or care what had happened with his ex-friends. Muybridge had known Leland Jr., whom he had photographed, but when the photographer eventually heard about the teenager’s death, how did he take it? Did he write a letter of condolence? Probably not. Did he feel sadistic pleasure, schadenfreude, that the Octopus was suffering? Did he just fix his eyes on the new job at Penn and shrug?
The building the school had loaned him stood on Thirty-sixth Street at the corner of Pine Street, and Muybridge set up his studio in a courtyard behind it. The outdoor space formed an isosceles triangle about the area of a tennis court, hidden from the street, with two brick walls for borders and the third side blocked from view by a high fence. Everyone understood the reason. For these pictures, Muybridge wanted to put a lot of naked women and men in front of his cameras. The photographer ordered forty lenses from England for the purpose, and the school paid. But even before he began, some administrators in their ribbon ties and trimmed beards were wondering whether Muybridge’s plans for copious nudity would offset the benefit to Penn’s reputation.
Just as he had in Palo Alto, Muybridge built a long shed in the private yard, the “camera house,” a bank of twenty-four cameras standing side-by-side inside and peering out of a twenty-four-foot-wide opening, like a long window. In front of each camera, he put electric shutters to be set off at intervals by a timing device, similar to what he had used before. But there were improvements. He built a new apparatus—twelve cameras, rammed together in a four-foot-wide cluster and mounted on legs—which could be moved around and aimed at the subject at any angle. (The cameras in the cluster used smaller negatives, less than two inches square.) Another upgrade came in the negatives themselves. Whereas Muybridge had used wet plates in California (the old collodion technique, the plates hand prepared one at a time), at Penn he used a new emulsion on glass, so-called dry plates, manufactured negatives you could buy in packs of a hundred. Dry plates gulped more light, took faster pictures than collodion, and froze motion easily.7 The extra cameras and new plates meant a huge increase in volume and sharper, brighter freeze-frames.
At the University of Pennsylvania, Muybridge built a camera shed similar to the one at Palo Alto and added a cluster of cameras on a stand (at left, with a man bent over it), which could be moved around to change points of view. (Illustration Credit c20.2)
For his first subjects (he started in June 1884), Muybridge turned the cameras on everyday life. Consistently, sometimes for a week straight, he photographed naked women. “The female models were chosen from all classes of society,” he said in his notebook. “Number 1, is a widow, aged thirty-five, somewhat slender and above the medium height; 3 is married, and heavily built; 4 to 13 inclusive are unmarried, of ages varying from seventeen to twenty-four.” And so on. These were to be motion studies and moving pictures that looked at ordinary people, unclothed, but also at extraordinary ones. “Model number 20 is unmarried, and weighs 340 pounds,” he said of one woman.8
“Professor Muybridge,” one newspaper said, “protected from the sun by an old straw hat, walks about the field like a Western stock farmer.” (The photographer referred to himself as, and insisted that others call him, “professor,” although he had no diplomas above high school, and never taught a class.) “He fixes the slides, gives out orders, like the mate of a schooner in a gale, and when everything is ready the professor sits on a small beer keg, holding an electric key in his hand.”9 The image of Muybridge sitting to one side with a device in hand and a fierce eye trained on actors without clothes may, to a later generation, look like the classic pose of a filmmaker.
He photographed women and men performing a hundred tasks, each movement two or three seconds in duration. Half the scripts involved athletes, half ordinary folk. Muybridge photographed his models naked more than half the time: a blacksmith with a hammer on an anvil; a woman pouring water from a pitcher; two male wrestlers trying to throw one another; a woman picking up a baby; a man executing a high jump; a woman greeting a dog; two male boxers punching one another; a woman putting on a gown; a man hitting a baseball; two women kissing one another on the lips; a man shoveling dirt; a woman bathing in a tub; a male acrobat doing a backflip; a woman rolling a stone along the ground; a woman doing a knee-high jump; a woman smoking; Muybridge himself, naked, throwing a discus.
The majority of the 781 separate series of photographs that Muybridge made at the University of Pennsylvania depicted not animals but people, including Two Women Shaking Hands and Kissing Each Other…Most photographs were nudes, and many told a story, often sexual. (Illustration Credit c20.3)
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…Walking, Saddle; Female Rider, Nude…(Illustration Credit c20.4)
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The penises of the men flopped (especially the acrobats), and their testicles flew for the cameras. The breasts of women heaved up and around.
The photographer kept good records of everything.
PHOTO SERIES
July 16, 1885
900. Miss Aimer, nude, getting into bed.
904. Miss Aimer, nude, walking, with hat and high heel shoes on
July 18, 1885
938. Miss Aimer, nude, jumping a string, 2 ft. high
939. Miss Aimer, nude, bathing, pouring water over head
948. Miss Aimer & Mrs. Cooper, nude, waltzing
949. Miss Cooper, nude, giving Miss Aimer drink from water jar
954. Miss Aimer & Mrs. Cooper, nude, meeting and kissing
The model “Miss Aimer” seemed most compliant as the “scientific” investigation gave free rein to voyeuristic pleasure. One day Muybridge asked Miss Aimer to crawl naked on her hands and knees, anticipating a porn movie trope from a hundred years later. Muybridge took only slightly less interest in “Miss Edmundson,” who in photograph #692 walked naked up and down a set of stairs. “Miss Edmundson is age 23 yrs,” Muybridge wrote in his notebook. “Wt 111 lbs, ht 5 ft 2½ in., shoe 2½, hips (max) 37½ in., waist 26 in., around shoulders 37½ in., bust, 33½ in.”10 He had a naked Miss Edmundson bend over a lot (to pick up a handkerchief and other things), as well as splash around in water with another nude model.
Muybridge, Woman, Sitting and Smoking, 1887 (Illustration Credit c20.5)
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Inside men at the university worried about the nudes. Anyone could see that what the hired star wanted to photograph was strange, prurient, and taboo. Edward Coates, a member of the Muybridge Committee, wrote Penn’s provost about censoring some of the pictures. “There are probably some lines to be drawn with regard to some of the plates,” Coates said. But it was somebody else’s problem, Coates said, displacing his anxiety onto others. “That there will be objections in some quarters to the publication would seem to be most likely if not inevitable.”
Coates was president of Philadelphia’s Academy of the Fine Arts, and when he couldn’t censor Muybridge, he came down hard on someone else, Muybridge’s friend Thomas Eakins, the artist who had helped bring the photographer to Penn. Eakins, who taught classes in painting, also broke the rules with nudes. The painter had a reputation for close relationships with his students at the art academy, men as well as women. In 1883, Eakins, age forty, painted a landscape, The Swimming Hole, depicting himself swimming in a pond toward six nude men. Eakins, inspired by Muybridge, had been photographing his students, and himself, in the nude, ostensibly to improve instruction in drawing. One photo he took showed Eakins and one of his women students, both naked, facing the camera—it caused enough trouble and gossip that Edward Coates fired the artist from the school. Eakins became collateral damage from the Muybridge project.11
Muybridge, Stages of Men Wrestling, 1887 (Illustration Credit c20.6)
Muybridge, self-portrait, Walking, Ascending Step, Using Shovel, Using Pick, 1887 (Illustration Credit c20.7)
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ew a larger version of this image.
In May 1885, Muybridge turned again to animals, taking his portable apparatus, the cluster of cameras on a stand, to the Philadelphia zoo. On the first grueling day amid the cages in near-hundred-degree heat, he photographed pigeons. Bird number one saw its cage open, but with the heat, it did not fly out, spoiling the photos. When an animal wrangler opened the cage of bird number two, it flew too fast, and Muybridge missed the picture. With bird number three, the cage opened and the bird flew straight across the target background, a twelve-foot expanse. The shutters went off, according to one newspaper, “like a miniature Gatling gun,” grabbing the flight. Afterward, Muybridge went around the zoo to photograph a Bengal tiger, a lion, and a rhino, each of them moving around in its cage. He also took one photo series apiece of a kangaroo, baboon, sloth, raccoon, camel, jaguar, elephant, buffalo, giraffe, elk, deer, and hog. He had trouble with the lions (named George and Princess); the photographer had put a screen in their cage to reflect more light, and Princess ripped it down because it covered the door to her lair.
Returning to Penn, Muybridge seemed to feel he had little “natural” movement left to photograph, so he looked to “unnatural” motion. His starting point would be people with disabilities. He persuaded a physician, Dr. Francis Dercum, to bring him patients from the Blockley Hospital for the Poor, across the street from Penn. And just as he had taken a voyeuristic interest in women, Muybridge now shot “interesting cases”—mentally ill patients, people with amputations, others with “spastic gait” or “locomotor ataxia.”12 In one case, he asked Dercum to apply electric shocks to a patient in order to provoke convulsions, and then photographed those. The interest of science covered many things.