781 photographic plates that lead to the invention of cinema.
The ADAA: The Art Show is celebrating a quarter century this year. In all 72 association member galleries are scheduled to participate, displaying work from all major art-historical periods from the Old Masters all the way to Contemporary Art. One of the galleries returning to the Park Avenue Armory this year is a well-known 57th-street gallery that specializes in Fine Art Photography. Laurence Miller, Founder and Director of the gallery talked to galleryIntell about the gallery’s focus during the fair. Like so many of the participating galleries this year, Laurence Miller Gallery is featuring a single artist, in this case the famous innovator of photographic stop-motion techniques and arguably the forefather of early cinema – the British born Eadweard Muybridge.
Matthew Brandt at M+B Gallery
It seems it all really started with a bet when then – California Governor Leland Stanford approached the eccentric Muybridge to help him settle a bet. Stanford believed that all four of the horse’s hooves left the ground when it galloped – his opponent didn’t agree. It took Muybridge years of experimentation and perfecting the technique but in the end the Governor won his bet and Muybridge successfully proved that as the horse ran, it was, if only for a moment, airborne. Now, more than a century later this very sequence of frames with the galloping horse remains the best-known example of early stop-motion photography.
There were naked laughing ladies, pouring buckets of water on each other, two bare-bodied fencers, a walking ostrich, a series of stills of a smoking female nude, a suited man walking away, swaying his brief-case, an athlete practicing what could be interpreted by a 21st century viewer as yoga positions, various gymnasts jumping across multiple still frames joined into strips of images and many more.
Interview transcript on page 2