Eadweard Muybridge and Hiroshi Sugimoto

Time and visibility play key roles in both Hiroshi Sugimoto’s and Eadweard Muybridge’s work. Both artists depict the passage of time through film photography. For Sugimoto, it is layering moments of time together; for Muybridge, it was breaking down time into separate moments.

Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) began investigating the photographic capture of motion in 1872. These early experiments were limited by the low light-sensitivity of existing photographic emulsions and the lack of a precise shutter mechanism in most cameras. By 1878, Muybridge had developed a high-speed shutter and sequential camera arrays that allowed him to capture individual moments in the motion of a racehorse, famously proving that all four of a galloping horse’s hooves leave the ground at once.

After nine years of continued work in this vein, Muybridge’s photographic motion studies culminated in the publication of “Animal Locomotion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements.” The artist had created an encyclopedic anatomy of motion, depicting humans and animals in various stages of work, play, and rest. Since its publication, the work has remained a reference, equally valuable to artists, scientists, and photographers.

To present his work to live audiences, Muybridge developed a motion projector that he named the “zoopraxiscope,” which reanimated the still images and prefigured the appearance of cinema in the following years. By first breaking down the steps of movement and then bringing them back into motion, Muybridge revealed to viewers interstitial states of being that had effectively been hiding in plain sight at the limits of human perception.

Hiroshi Sugimoto first became conscious of time and vision as a schoolboy, when he learned that light takes several seconds to travel from the moon to a viewer on earth. This revelation stayed with him and sparked a life-long investigation of the mysterious discrepancy between what one sees and what one can really know.

Almost a century after Muybridge used photography to freeze time, Sugimoto had an experience that would lead him to one of his most significant bodies of work. He describes it this way:

“I’m a habitual self-interlocutor. One evening while taking photographs at the American Museum of Natural History, I had a near-hallucinatory vision. My internal question-and-answer session leading up to this vision went something like this: ‘Suppose you shoot a whole movie in a single frame?’ The answer: ‘You get a shining screen.’ Immediately I began experimenting in order to realize this vision.

“One afternoon I walked into a cheap cinema in the East Village with a large-format camera. As soon as the movie started, I fixed the shutter at a wide-open aperture. When the movie finished two hours later, I clicked the shutter closed. That evening I developed the film, and my vision exploded behind my eyes.”

For over 50 years, Sugimoto has photographed the interiors of theaters using this process. In the resulting photographs, the rapidly changing elements on the screen become a single luminous white field and the projection’s ambient light quietly brings forward the architecture of these spaces and individually defines details that would be largely invisible in the darkness.

Both artists use photography to make time visible, creating records outside the bounds of observation. Muybridge’s technical innovations segmented time into previously imperceptible increments, highlighting impossibly fast changes. Through the long exposure, Sugimoto allows moments to accumulate, transforming hours of movement into a single image and revealing what persists over the passage of time.

“To watch a two-hour movie is simply to look at 172,800 photographic afterimages”.

– Hiroshi Sugimoto