Jake's Reviews > Muybridge and Mobility (Volume 6)

As the title suggests, Muybridge and Mobility examines the photography of Eadweard Muybridge through the analytical lens of “mobility”. The text consists of two essays written by two separate authors – namely, cultural geographer and social theorist Tim Cresswell (a personal favourite), and art historian John Ott. Working within their respective disciplines, the authors use the concept of “mobility” as an organizing theme and an entry point for discussing Muybridge’s ground-breaking motion-studies work, particularly his masterpiece, Animal Locomotion.

In the first essay, Cresswell leans on Walter Benjamin to read Muybridge within various “constellations of mobility” that were transforming society in the late 19th and early 20th-century. Cresswell is particularly interested in the sequences involving horses, which he conceptualizes as a kind of liminal space of mobility, situated between a fading epoch defined by horse-drawn power, and an emergent one characterized by steam power, rail, and automobiles. Muybridge also tried to elevate his own aesthetic and normative work to the level of scientific legitimacy. The photographer deployed a number of strategies to achieve this sort of “scientific mobility”, including the use of gridded backgrounds and other pseudo-scientific facades. In doing so, Cresswell argues that the camera, the non-human subjects, and the backgrounds were active – not passive – agents of historical change. “They were”, he claims, “implicated in the production of a particular kind of space.”

In contrast to Cresswell’s more speculative and philosophic examination, Ott’s essay frames Animal Locomotion squarely within the social and racial history of Gilded Age America. Moving away from the abstract toward the concrete, Ott unpacks the inclusion of Black athletes within Muybridge’s work – most notably, his inclusion of Black boxers and jockeys – and suggests that his motion-studies afforded a degree of social and racial “mobility” that was not accessible to Blacks in the other domains of public life. As an interracial project, Animal Locomotion crossed colour lines and gave certain Black athletes an opportunity to challenge racial hierarchies, transgress social customs, and thwart segregation laws. Although Ott acknowledges that these opportunities for resistance and ascension were limited, they were still opportunities nonetheless. As Ott states, the Black athletes featured in Muybridge’s photographs “[…] could occupy marginal yet productive spaces, both social and discursive, unavailable to most African Americans.” In this case, photography dislocated and loosened up the essential separations of race and class – if only briefly.

In both essays, it becomes apparent that Muybridge and his subjects were central – not peripheral – to the technological revolution that was happening around them. Indeed, the motion-studies work of Muybridge must be understood as at least partly responsible for the tectonic shifts in our shared cultural assumptions about space, time, and social hierarchies.

All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed Muybridge and Mobility. The text succeeds on both of its promises; in the first, as a solid piece of cultural theory, and in the second, as an engaging study of a vital 19th-century figure.