Plate Number 372. Acrobat, horizontal "press up"
Medium
collotype
Dimensions
image: 21.2 × 34.15 cm (8 3/8 × 13 7/16 in.) sheet: 47.75 × 60.3 cm (18 13/16 × 23 3/4 in.)
Classification
Photograph
Department
CPH
Museum
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Credit
Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase, 1887)
Accession Number
2014.79.393
Art Historical Context
Step into the groundbreaking world of motion photography with *Plate Number 372. Acrobat, horizontalpress up"* by Eadweard Muy, created in 1887. This collotype print, part of Muybridge's monumental *Animal Locomotion*, captures an acrobat mid-performance in a dynamic sequence of poses. Measuring 21.2 × 34.15 cm in its image area on a larger 47.75 × 60.3 cm sheet, it exemplifies Muybridge's obsessive quest to dissect human movement, using a battery of up to 24 cameras triggered by the subject's motion. Muybridge, a British-born innovator often called the "father of the motion picture," employe...
About the Artist
Eadweard Muybridge · 1830–1904
Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) was an English-American photographer who revolutionized the understanding of motion through his pioneering chronophotographic studies. Born Edward James Muggeridge in Kingston upon Thames, England, he emigrated to America and became famous first for his dramatic landscape photographs of Yosemite Valley, then for his groundbreaking motion studies that proved horses li...