Description
- Abstract:
- This dissertation examines the reciprocal influence of Eadweard Muybridge’s motion studies from Animal Locomotion and the researches of the artists and scientists who worked with Muybridge at the University of Pennsylvania. Because Muybridge’s photographs recorded phases of movement invisible to the naked eye, they raised doubts about the viability of empirical knowledge. I demonstrate that Muybridge’s collaborators not only shaped the methods and objects of his project, but also investigated the same questions raised by the motion studies in their own practices. Often, as in Muybridge’s work, these epistemological considerations intersected with studies of the human body and were informed by medical and social understandings of gender. This dissertation therefore contributes to the literature on Muybridge’s motion studies by approaching Animal Locomotion as a collaborative undertaking. More broadly, it reassess how nineteenth-century users and viewers of photographs negotiated the limits and identity of the medium. Chapter 1 provides an overview of Muybridge’s career, and situates his arrival at the University within the larger context of scientific professionalization and the postbellum “University revolution” in the United States. Chapter 2 contends that Muybridge’s instantaneous photographs exemplified an ideal of trained and unbiased vision that by the late 1880s had become a defining attribute of both the modern scientific enterprise and the modern figure of the professional scientist. Chapter 3 relates Muybridge’s motion studies of men to a new discourse of embodied masculinity that emerged in the late nineteenth century. Through a close reading of physical culture photographs and manuals, I argue that photography created a space for the self-reflexive performance of masculinity. Like chapter 3, Chapter 4 focuses on the nexus of photography and the body by analyzing the semiotic status of the blur in relation to Muybridge’s studies of subjects with movement disorders and within the larger context of photographically illustrated medical texts, many of which were written by physicians in Muybridge’s circle. Finally, in a brief epilogue I explore how Muybridge’s photographs challenged the thought of two early experimental psychologists, Francis Galton and James McKeen Cattell.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2015)
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Citation
Handlin, Emily H.,
"Moving Beyond Vision: Eadweard Muybridge in Philadelphia"
(2015).
History of Art and Architecture Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0DN43FX
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History of Art and Architecture Theses and Dissertations
Theses and Dissertations for the History of Art and Architecture department....