Another Look (Horse)
As the story goes,
Leland Stanford made a $25,000 bet that all four hooves leave the ground at
once when a horse is at full gallop, and that he hired Eadweard Muybridge to
prove this.
If the story is true,
Muybridge won the bet for Stanford, as we see here.
So why didn't anyone see
this before?
The horse's legs simply move
faster than the eye can register the motion. Artists had shown horses
airborne, but usually like this, with legs outstretched in what's called the
rocking horse position.
As we see here, there is no
such position for a horse.
Muybridge stopped the
horse in mid-air. Painters began to
depict horses in truer positions, as in this twentieth-century lithograph. But
the achievement was bigger than this. Muybridge's work showed the world, for
the first time, something in nature that passes unseen because it moves too
fast.
Instant exposure changed the
art form of photography, too. This picture by the Indian artist Raghubir Singh
reminds us of a still-wondrous quality of the camera - its ability to freeze
forever a moment so fleeting that it cannot be fully seen or felt as it
happens.