Eadweard Muybridge: An Eye Over the Abyss
In the first years of Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic work, the preoccupation with precipices, peripheral zones and abyss-edges propelled his itinerary, as though the experimentation of his work necessitated journeys to topographical frontiers at which previously habitual forms had expired, and the only way forward would now be via from-scratch innovations that treated existing technologies as scorched-earth detritus. As a result, Muybridge’s eye is always on the originating edge of vision and in interrogative movement, scanning terrains that are themselves in flux and newly-created.
An exclusive excerpt from Stephen Barber‘s Muybridge: The Eye in Motion.