Before the Oscars there was Helios: Eadweard Muybridge at SFMOMA

By Emma Krasov
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art once again wows the public with an important photography exhibition, originated at Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, and coming here after a successful run at Tate Britain, London, Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change.
An amazing display of fascinating landscapes, creative celebrity collages, and revolutionary moving photography produced by the pioneer of motion pictures, Eadweard Muybridge, comes back from the archives to celebrate his genius. The show also brings back the 19th century viewers’ experience of Muybridge’s stereographs with the help of the plastic spectacles hanging in the gallery next to his original double-takes.
Born before the dawn of photography, and gone before its high noon, Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) paved the way to all the fantastic advancements in cinematography known to the humankind today.
Coming from England, Muybridge notoriously developed his career in California, documenting the growth of San Francisco, the building of the railroads, the Modoc War, and the development of Central America.
He devised techniques to freeze animal and human locomotion, to depict movement as sequences of still images, and to reanimate these in some of the first projected moving pictures. Muybridge was commissioned by the governor of California and founder of Stanford University Leland Stanford to photograph horses in motion to catch a moment when all four of a horse’s hooves are off the ground.
When Muybridge published his Animal Locomotion in 1887, he had opened the flood gate to the design of cinema. The show runs through June 7 at 151 Third St., San Francisco; 415-357-4000; www.sfmoma.org.
Image: courtesy of SFMOMA: Leland Stanford, Jr. on his Pony “Gypsy”—Phases of a Stride by a Pony While Cantering, 1879.