Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Eadweard Muybridge, one of the great pioneer-innovators of the 19th century, is a familiar figure to students of art history, photography, and cinema. Best known for the photographs of horses and other animals in motion that he made in the 1870s and '80s, Muybridge was the first person to use photography to freeze rapid action for analysis and study. He devised a method for photographing episodes of behavior using a series of cameras, producing some of the most famous sequential photographs ever made. These pictures, the first successful photographs of rapidly moving subjects, revolutionized expectations of what photography could reveal about the natural world, and ultimately led to the invention of the motion picture in the mid-1890s.

Time Stands Still is the catalogue that accompanies a major exhibition celebrating Muybridge's fascinating work. Though the instantaneous photography movement stands as a crucial event in the progression of photography to motion pictures, this exhibition represents the first major organized treatment of the subject. Opening in spring 2003 at the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University and touring through 2004, it combines an examination of the artist's career in motion photography with a survey of early attempts to photograph moving subjects. Guest curator Phillip Prodger is the primary author of the catalogue, but the book also includes a valuable essay covering cinema's earliest experiments by Tom Gunning, an acknowledged expert on early film from the University of Chicago. The exhibition will display Muybridge's zoopraxiscope and other equipment, drawings, ephemera, and photographs made from the invention of photography in the 1830s to the end of Muybridge's career, which culminated with the publication of his encyclopedic work, Animal Locomotion, in 1887.

The photographs and objects are drawn largely from the collection of the Cantor Center and are supplemented with a selection of stop-action photographs from other private and public collections. Among those represented will be the work of Talbot, Rejlander, Maray, Eakins, Edison, the Lumiere Frères, and others.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Foreword (p. VII)
• Acknowledgments (p. X)
• Chronology (p. XIV)
• A Time and Place: Eadweard Muybridge and His Legacy (p. 2)
• In the Blink of an Eye: The Rise of the Instantaneous Photography Movement, 1839-78 (p. 24)
• How to Make an Instantaneous Photograph (p. 65)
• Make It Stop: Muybridge and the New Frontier in Instantaneous Photography (p. 112)
• The First Zoopraxiscope Disc: The First Motion Picture? (p. 154)
• Never Seen This Picture Before: Muybridge in Multiplicity (p. 222)
• The Larkyns Affair (p. 258)
• Checklist of the Exhibition (p. 273)
• Selected Bibliography (p. 295)
• Index (p. 303)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Eadweard Muybridge's best-known photography, completed during the 1870s and 1880s, captures the motion of moving people and animals in a series of frames. Difficult to classify, these works fall somewhere between photography and cinema. Prodger's book, which accompanies an exhibition that will travel through 2004, links Muybridge to a loosely associated group of 19th-century photographers he identifies as the "instantaneous photography movement." The author also examines various definitions of instantaneous photography, which involves the instant capture of a natural moment without lengthy film exposure. Prodger (assistant curator, prints, drawings, and photographs, St. Louis Art Museum) is successful in relating Muybridge's work to that of numerous other photographers of the instantaneous movement by analyzing pictorial compositions and comparing photographic techniques. An additional essay by Tom Gunning, a film expert at the University of Chicago, adds illuminating comparisons of Muybridge's work to symbolist painting. Prodger's thoughtful analysis is recommended for academic libraries, while Gordon Hendricks's recently reprinted Eadweard Muybridge: The Father of the Motion Picture is a more general biography suitable for most public libraries.-Eric Linderman, East Cleveland P.L., OH (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Early photography innovator Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904; he went by an assortment of names and alternative spellings) is primarily known for his photographic series of animals in motion, begun in the 1870s, that led to cinematography. Not a biography, this catalogue to a touring exhibition is instead both a critical overview of Muybridge's aesthetic achievements in photography and an engaging history of the instantaneous photography movement, a set of innovations that swept away the excruciatingly long exposure-times of then-conventional photography, and of which Muybridge's motion studies were a part. St. Louis Art Museum assistant curator Prodger makes an excellent selection of photographs, from the first known "snapshot" of two women in a window (attributed to David E. James & Co., circa 1855) to Muybridge's own famous studies of horse gaits. It is amazing to read about the fierce debates over what constituted an "instant photograph," bringing home how much we take for granted today with our unobtrusive split-second cameras. Muybridge himself remains a mysterious figure, a center of continuing controversy and tall tales, much of it due to the murder of his wife's lover. However, his technological achievements often overshadowed his aesthetic innovations-it is this oversight that this volume seeks to remedy, by definitively repositioning Muybridge's work within the history of photography and of art itself. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved