Edgerton, Trotting, Stride

Eadweard Muybridge

1887

Collotype

Seattle Art Museum

In May 1872, Muybridge made his first photograph of a horse trotting on a racetrack in Sacramento, California. From 1884 to early 1886, he would take over 20,000 photographs documenting various stages of human and animal activity. Muybridge's working method involved at least two units of twelve cameras each to record these rapid movements in real time. As photography historian Keith Davis perceptively wrote: "Indeed, these pictures generated much discussion on the nature of vision and representation-the difference between 'normal' and 'instantaneous' impressions, for example, and the correspondence between scientific and artistic tr