Muybridge and the Riddle of Locomotion

Gr 4 Up—Muybridge was a 19th-century British photographer best known for his photos of a horse. Leland Stanford, a California racehorse breeder, felt that a better understanding of how a horses run would serve trainers, and the animals. Stanford commissioned Muybridge to take rapid, successive photos of his racer, Sally G; people were specifically interested to know if at any moment during a race all four legs were off the ground (a bet was involved). Since high-speed photography had yet to be invented, Muybridge set up a series of cameras to snap images a tenth of a second apart. In addition to answering the question, the photos and similar experiments that followed allowed people to study animal and human locomotion. Braun explains Muybridge's efforts in clear terms, and, as she relates, his images led to experimentation with high-speed photography, ultimately resulting in the invention of movies. This slim volume has black-and-white reproductions of Muybridge's sequential photos, as well as four lenticular images that operate like animations. The latter will thrill kids, and while they suggest the photographer's work, they don't accurately represent the extent of it. Muybridge had a long career and took thousands of pictures; this book presents a sliver of his oeuvre and a moment in the history of photography, but they are an important sliver and an important moment.—Daryl Grabarek, School Library Journal