Animal Locomotion, Plate 646

Eadweard Muybridge was one of the world?s most influential and innovative photographers. He was well known for producing sequential images of moving animals and humans as artistic and scientific experimentations that changed the way we understand motion and for revealing photographic capabilities critical to the development of early photography and cinema. These photographs were often presented with Muybridge?s invented zoopraxiscope, a mechanism that projected the stills as a moving image. In this black-and-white sequential image from the famous Animal Locomotion series, Muybridge presents two horizontal rows of 12 images?in descending and ascending size?of a male figure jumping a horse over an obstacle. As the rider gallops first toward the camera and then away, the sequence delineates the physical movement of both the human and the animal typically too fast to be fully viewed by the human eye alone.