MUNICH.- The British-American photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) is considered one of the pioneers of the photography of movement. With the help of a complex experimental set-up and an innovative camera system he succeeded in capturing the sequence of movement of a galloping horse in a series of individual photographs for the first time in the history of photography.

In 1887 he published the epochal volume of plates ‘Animal Locomotion’ that shows humans and animals in motion in 781 sequences of pictures. Today, this work is regarded as one of the milestones in the history of photography. Muybridge gained his initial impulse to analyse movement using photography from the American railway tycoon and horse breeder Leland Stanford. In 1872, Stanford commissioned him to take pictures of his famous racehorse ‘Occident’ galloping, in order to study the sequence of movements that cannot be seen in detail by the human eye. Muybridge’s results were enthusiastically received and, thanks to a grant from the University of Pennsylvania, he was able to continue and intensify his studies for several years.

Up until 1885 he took series of photographs of some 200 human models and a large number of animals in various forms of locomotion. Virtually anticipating the medium of film, he arranged these sequences in strips in the form of tableaux and, using the collotype printing technique, published them in 1887 as large-format plates entitled ‘Animal Locomotion’.

To this day, ‘Animal Locomotion’ is considered one of the most influential works in the history of photography and a distinctive point of reference in the fields of science and art. Not only the depiction of moving horses in painting changed fundamentally after the publication of Muybridge’s work. His series of images also served as a source of inspiration for modern artists such as Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon and Cy Twombly.

A substantial number of original collotype prints from ‘Animal Locomotion’ that constitute a representative cross-section of Muybridge’s work are included in the holdings of the Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation. 24 of these plates are now being shown by the Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation in the Pinakothek der Moderne.