“Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change”
Tate Britain
Millbank
September 13, 2010–January 16, 2011
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)
151 Third Street
February 26–June 7, 2011
Corcoran Gallery of Art
500 17th Street, NW
April 10–July 18, 2010
Curated by Philip Brookman
Eadweard Muybridge’s fame rests largely on the 1887 publication and popular dissemination of Animal Locomotion, in which marvelously matter-of-fact images of men, women, children, horses, elephants, birds, and anything else he could wrangle into his studio are arranged in 781 sequential grids like frames in a film. That project has nearly eclipsed a career of experimentation and innovation that began in San Francisco twenty years earlier and involved virtually every sort of photographic subject, process, and format. This retrospective, the first devoted to the full range of Muybridge’s work, focuses new attention on his pioneering western landscapes, including unusually large-scale views of Yosemite and detailed panoramas of San Francisco, as well as the devices Muybridge invented to capture and project motion.