photography of movement

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The limitations of early photographic chemistry and optics meant that there could be no movement at all in front of the camera if a clear image were to be made. Anything that moved would either blur or streak the picture; if the exposure were too long, the moving subject would disappear altogether. Scientists had long observed that any rapidly moving object seems perfectly stationary when illuminated by the explosion of an electrically generated spark (just as a flash of lightning seems to make everything within its arc stop for an instant), and had used the camera to record this phenomenon by 1850. In 1851, for example, Henry Talbot, experimenting with a printed sheet rotating on a wheel, captured an image in which the words on the paper ‘were perfectly well defined and wholly unaffected by the motion of the disc’. But outside the laboratory, daguerreotypes and calotypes portrayed hauntingly empty city streets that in reality were filled with pedestrians and carriages: the long exposure time had obliterated them all. The wet-plate process that superseded these processes was also relatively slow; but photographing from a distance, reducing the negative size—a practice used by Charles Nègre for his 1850s Parisian genre scenes—or using lenses that concentrated the light reaching the plate, did permit the first successful attempts at capturing motion. What these earliest snapshots revealed were awkward postures quite different from anything seen by the naked eye, dictated by common sense, or represented by artists. Nonetheless, the depiction of movement in a photograph effectively fixed moments that the unaided eye could not perceive: it came to be understood as a way of suspending time, or making time eternal. One might perhaps say that, in its capacity to freeze movement, photography pictures our experience of time as an eternal ‘now’ which is always ‘then’.

In the early 1880s the standardization and mass manufacture of gelatin dry plates initiated a revolution in photography. The plates were extraordinarily fast (1/1, 000 s was not beyond imagining) but, more important, their mass production freed the photographer from the complex and messy chemical manipulations involved in collodion plate preparation, and photography from the confines of the studio. Soon cheap hand-held cameras designed for the dry plate appeared, and photography became a leisure enterprise available to anyone who could afford a camera and a packet of plates.

Scientific experimentation in the photography of movement created an enormous vogue for ‘instantaneous photography’, while at the same time its association with science raised the status of motion photography in general. Leland Stanford's commission to Eadweard Muybridge was the first of these experiments, and though Muybridge used wet collodion, not dry plates, he published his images in 1878 just as dry plates started to become widely available. The excitement created by Muybridge's widely publicized pictures of running horses, and the extensive dissemination of Marey's chronophotography after 1882, meant that leaps, somersaults, and jumps frozen in mid-trajectory became a palette of effects that enlivened the photographs of both the scientifically inclined amateur and the Kodak-toting Sunday snapshooter. Free from preconceived ideas about composition or aesthetics, the unrehearsed spontaneity of these pictures was identified with the rush and exhilaration of modernity. Jacques-Henri Lartigue, who delighted in photographing all the new symbols of mechanical progress, danger, and speed, provides us with one of the most striking examples of this trend. His joy in capturing family and friends in mid-air, fashionable ladies strolling in the Bois de Boulogne, racing cars, and swooping aeroplanes lies as much in the photograph as in the achievement of making it at all. Lartigue used the camera to discover what occurs in an instant of time. With other amateurs, he helped establish a repertoire of accident and surprise that is the foundation of both the New Vision and photojournalism, where the camera's capacity to capture what happens in a moment still astonishes, enthralls, or horrifies us.

About ten years after Lartigue's most famous pictures were made (and with a world war in between), Henri Cartier-Bresson photographed movement in the form of complex, tightly structured compositions. For Cartier-Bresson, photographing movement was a way of making visible a surrealistic notion of time: not just a container in which events took place, but an ecstatic dimension of reality. In his method of working, Cartier-Bresson's eye finds a moment of order in the chaos of random movement, and simultaneously his camera—the newly marketed Leica II, with its eye-level viewfinder—records what he saw, freezing the motion that could only be perceived peripherally. The moment that Cartier-Bresson's camera captures is, however, not just any moment, but the right, the decisive moment, a visual configuration that satisfies the aesthetic demands of the photographer. It is not what actually happens in that moment, but what it looks like, that makes the moment decisive.

In the 1950s and 1960s the expatriate American William Klein (who also favoured blurred photographs as described below), the Swiss Robert Frank, and, in their wake, the Americans Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand, added the photographer's own movement to that of the moving subject and often made that mix the subject of their images. Seemingly fragments stolen in passing, their off-kilter compositions reflect both the photographer's role of capturing life on the fly, and the impossibility of the camera ever stilling the ceaseless motion just beyond the frame.

Time-lapse photography contracts the movements at the other end of the temporal spectrum: events too slow to be perceptible to the eye. Ernst Mach seems to have been the first to propose time-lapse photography in 1888, and his son Ludwig the first to adapt it to the growth of plants, taking pictures at fixed intervals from exactly the same position at the same time of day over a period of weeks to make visible the plant's unfurling interaction with its environment.

Overlong exposures and blurs, originally seen as mistakes or aberrant effects, have become creative tools to express the aesthetics of movement, and a way of compensating for the way that photography typically pictures time in instants rather than as a continuum. Time exposures register movement in real time, the time that the shutter is left open. Aimed at the night sky, the camera can track the rotation of the stars and planets as streaks across the sky or, more prosaically, it can register the cumulative patterns of light made by the headlights of moving cars as ribbons along the road. The Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto has made photographs inside cinemas, timing his exposure to the precise length of the film being projected. The resulting image documents the movie's passage as a radiant white rectangle, literally vanishing from the screen.

Camille Silvy was probably the earliest artist to use blur consciously in his 1850s landscapes to enliven what was otherwise embalmed stillness, and Julia Margaret Cameron used blur to great effect in her portraits. The 1911 photodynamic experiments of the brothers Anton Giulio and Arturo Bragaglia posited the blur as a metaphor for modernity because it could recreate in a photograph the effects of movement on the psyche. According to Anton Giulio, who wrote a manifesto proclaiming the superiority of photodynamism as art, the trajectory made by placing an open lens before a moving subject conveyed the emotional experience of the speed and dynamism of modern life. He belonged briefly to the Italian Futurist movement and his ideas were woven into the Futurist photography manifesto of 1930. But by this time German and Soviet avant-garde photography had made the snapshot's instantaneity central to their aesthetic: the work of Rodchenko and Moholy-Nagy, for example, made the Bragaglias' efforts seem archaic. Since the 1960s photographers including Dieter Appelt (b. 1935), Duane Michals, Michael Snow (b. 1929), and Ralph Eugene Meatyard have returned to the blur to undermine our complacency in photography's rendering of time as frozen movement, or to subvert photographic conventions of finicky exactitude. In their images, figures are rendered illegible by their movement; their fluidity emphasizes the transitory nature of the present, and makes visible the way in which photography sustains the illusion of what we call ‘now’. In testimony to the larger influence of the photography of movement on contemporary culture, the blurred photograph has become a prominent trope in the work of two Germans confronting the Nazi past, the writer W. G. Sebald and the painter Gerhard Richter (b. 1932). For them, the photographic blur has become a visual metaphor for the instability of memory and, more importantly, for the photograph's ultimate failure to represent what is ineffable and inexpressible.