Pamplona,
In its exhibition line dedicated to the examination of the relations between photography and science, and the footprint of the first steps of the photographic discipline in the subsequent and current development of the culture of the image, the University of Navarra Museum provides an exhibition to one of the pioneers in the capture of moving phenomena in static images, that is, of the time arrested, of course years before the strict invention of the cinema.
Eadweard VeryBridge (that was his artistic name, the Real was Edward James Muggeridge) was born in the British town of Kingston Upon Thames only nine years before photography as such was presented at the Academy of Sciences in Paris. As a son, advanced, of his time, he was very interested very soon for those innovations and they would dedicate himself more deeply after residing a time in the United States and deal with book trade, when an accident led him to return to his country to recover. He used his time to investigate the technical principles of photography and, when he returned to America, he would begin his journey as a western landscape photographer, especially Yosemite; He was very skilled handling wet colodion, so he won prestige quickly, on one side and another of the ocean.
Not long, the landscapes would not be enough and wanted to capture what was resisted to be fixed by the eye: it was worth prolonged exposure techniques to bring to their images with precision night skies and little simple landscapes. Wrapped in judicial messes (he was accused in 1874 of shooting an alleged lover of his wife), he moved away from the United States by the advice of his lawyers to move to the coast of Guatemala: he photographed his ports, in a set now preserved in the Cirma (Center for Regional Research of Mesoamerica), in which it was his last project before the great company for which we know it today: Locomotion animalits fundamental exploration of the movement. And after retiring, he even had time to order his file with the aim of preserving it for posterity.
The origin of that monumental work, Locomotion animalis actually found in the commission to Very Bridge by Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University and railway entrepreneur, that he resolved an issue that then (around 1872) had to occupy scientists, artists and equestrian fans: if the horses, when they galloped, raised at some point at the same time the four legs of the ground. In 1878, English would culminate his study of the animal movement: to catch the images of his gallop, he used twenty -four cameras aligned and loaded with an emulsified glass plaque with wet colodion; In addition, each one had a mechanical trigger that the movement of the equido activated.
The method allowed him to decompose the movement of animals in a series of individual images that, when contemplating in sequence, generated the impression of taking over a continuous movement. The trip to Guatemala was a break in the project, hence the delay, but when he could return to California he resumed the matter: he documented the jogging of the horse Sallier Gardner and found that, indeed, he could take off his four helmets from the ground.
In this way, the process seems easy, but required an unprecedented expertise: Very Bridge studies would give way to the first photography of the movement and to demonstrate that it was possible to perceive the dynamism of a subject through images seen in sequence. In the field of time and action registration, nothing would be the same since then: findings such as very Bridge opened the door to the capture in detail of ephemeral moments, of course to the cinema, and also to the development of vital images for scientific disciplines such as anatomy or biomechanics.
The next step, and derived from that, would be the aforementioned series Locomotion animalalmost a later decade: it was almost eight hundred sets of photographs that documented the movement of animals (horses, birds, dogs, elephants) and humans and in which it was involved, in terms of financial support, the University of Pennsylvania. When analyzing how the different species moved by synchronized cameras, he checked the similarities and differences between one and the other from a scientific but also artistic approach: he selected the most aesthetic positions to emphasize the beauty of its dynamism.
In the case of his human models, he attended both simple activities and complex movements and individuals of different ages, genres and physical types, so that artists and designers of their time, and later, nourished their progress: he died very much Bridge eight years before Duchamp elaborated his Naked down a ladder; The scientists better valued the biomechanics of human locomotion and, even, the documentation of the movements of a person with an artificial leg provided data to prostheses manufacturers.
His yearnings were aimed at filming: in parallel he devised the zoopraxiscope, a device prior to the modern film projector that allowed to project sequential images of movement on a screen, provoking the illusion of continuous displacement.
In the University of Navarra Museum they also await us works by one of the photographers who owe a lot to very Bridge, such as his contemporary Ethienne Marey, who was also a doctor and physiologist. He is the father of the chronophotography, also the result of his inquiries in the human and animal movement and of a simplification of the procedures of the previous one: his device could capture multiple phases of the action on a single plaque, thanks to high -speed cameras with a very fast mechanical shutter.
Very Bridge’s images did not seem precise enough, so, working autonomously but in parallel, in 1882 he perfected the so -called photographic shotgun, inspired by the previous photographic revolver that in 1874 had lit astronomer Jules Janssen. Marey also invented a chronomatographic fixed plate camera with a time shutter, practical when combining several successive images of a single movement on a plate.
Louis Lumière, Thomas Edison and William Dickson met their studies; They also adopted very Bridge the principle of projecting sequential images in a kinestoscope, a device that would be a direct history of cinematographic projectors. The human perception of time, of the mutation and, in short, of the real would not be the same again.
EADWEARD VERYBRIDGE
University of Navarra Museum
University Campus, s/n
Pamplona
From April 2 to August 24, 2025
